A hungry black bear barged into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, scarred several employees and helped itself to 60 cupcakes before ambling away.
Workers at Taste by Spellbound in the town of Avon were loading cakes into a van for delivery on Wednesday when the bear showed up. There are 1,000 to 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, the state environmental agency says, with sightings in 158 of the state's 169 towns and cities last year.
Miriam Stephens, the bakery's owner, wrote in an Instagram post that she heard employee Maureen Williams crying bloody murder and yelling that there was a bear in the garage.
Williams told a TV station WTNH that she shouted to scare the bear off, but it retreated and came back three times.
Williams said that she backed out of the garage and ran after the bear charged her.
Surveillance video obtained by WTNH shows bakers walking around the bakery to try to scare the bear, but then running away after it scares them.
The video shows the bear dragging a container of cupcakes from the garage into the parking lot. The bear ate 60 cupcakes, Stephens said.
The baker eventually got the bear to leave, honking a car horn, Williams said.
By the time the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Deep arrived, the four-footed thief was gone.
No one was injured in the encounter, which happened in a series of recent troubling interactions between black bears and humans in Connecticut.
A 74-year-old woman was attacked by a bear while walking her dog in a suburb of Hartford, the state capital's first such attack this year. There were two attacks in October, including one in October where a 10-year-old boy was mauled in a back yard.
The frequency and severity of bear-human interactions is increasing, said Paul Copleman, a Deep spokeswoman.
The department's statistics show that there were a record 67 reports of bears entering Connecticut homes in 2022.