Authorities shoot and kill black bear believed to have fatally mauled man in Arkansas

MOUNT JUDEA, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas officials shot and killed a male black bear that they believe fatally mauled a 60-year-old Missouri man last week at his campsite in the Ozark National Forest, authorities said Monday.

The body of Max Thomas of Springfield, Missouri, was discovered Thursday several yards outside the Sam’s Throne campground in northwest Arkansas, Newton County Sheriff Glenn Wheeler said.

A deputy had gone to the campground after the man’s son reported he had not heard from his father, who had sent his family pictures of a black bear in his camp Tuesday morning, Wheeler said. The deputy found evidence of a struggle and injury, including drag marks from the campground into the woods, the sheriff said.

“We believe he was in the process of breaking down his camp when the attack occurred,” Wheeler said.

The state medical examiner’s office determined the man’s death to be an “animal mauling.”

On Sunday, a bear was caught on a trail camera near the campground that appeared to be the same animal photographed by the victim and encountered by another man at a roadside overlook in the area, Wheeler said.

Local hunters and hounds were brought into the area and quickly tracked the bear, which was killed and transported to Little Rock, where authorities will obtain DNA samples to confirm it is the bear who fatally attacked the man.

“We knew the bear in the photos was a male and this one is too,” Wheeler said in a press release. “It matches the size of the photographed bear and has the same facial colorations. Not to mention it was back in the same area where the attack happened.”

It is the second fatal bear attack in Arkansas in recent weeks. In September, a 72-year-old man died after being attacked by a bear in nearby Franklin County, according to authorities with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

Despite the recent attacks, Don White Jr., a large mammal ecologist at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, said fatal bear attacks in Arkansas are “exceedingly rare.”

The last confirmed fatal bear attack in Arkansas was in 1892, said Keith Stephens, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

Although black bears were common in Arkansas before European settlement, the numbers dwindled to fewer than 50 by the 1930s, White said. Those numbers have continued to climb since the reintroduction of hundreds of black bears into the Ouachita and Ozark mountains of Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s, with an estimated 5,000 black bears in the state now, although White said that figure is difficult to pinpoint.