Union Beach Defends Police Officers Who Killed Bear

UNION BEACH, NJ — The two police officers who killed a black bear in Union Beach "feel horrible about it," Mayor Paul Smith told Patch Tuesday. Three days after a 400-pound black bear was shot dead Saturday night, this tiny Jersey Shore town on the Raritan Bay is being criticized for the officers' decision — to which locals fire back that Union Beach never expected to encounter a bear.

The town is also now entangled in a heated fight with the state Department of Environmental Protection and the Division of Fish & Wildlife, who they say abandoned them when they asked for help.

Councilman Charlie Cocuzza witnessed the entire event from beginning to end Saturday night, when an officer fired seven shots into the bear in a backyard on Florence Avenue.

"The bear was aggressive and agitated," Cocuzza told Patch. "He was running through backyards and through wooden fences as easily as you and I running through wet toilet paper. If he couldn't run through a fence, he crushed it."

The bear was first spotted around 10 p.m. Saturday in an abandoned lot on Edmunds Avenue, where it was in a tree for some time. It's very likely the same bear spotted in Middletown on Thursday, Smith said. Union Beach police responded, and immediately contacted Fish & Wildlife, asking them to tranquilize and remove the bear.

"We really thought that was the process. We thought they would come," said Cocuzza. "I heard the entire call and the person on the other end of the phone said they're not coming out on weekends."

Instead, Fish & Wildlife directed the police to turn off their lights, tell residents to stay indoors, bring pets inside and remove garbage cans. Police set up a several-block perimeter around the bear, but people kept walking in and out of their homes, getting into cars or taking out trash, Cocuzza said. Some people even rode bikes through the perimeter.

"We saw him head out towards the marsh and we all breathed a sigh of relief. We'd have to warn Keyport he was coming," said Cocuzza. "But then he turned right and headed back inland. I'm telling you, at that point it was so defeating. Our concern was someone was going to take out the trash and have a bear on top of them."

The bear was a Category 3 risk, meaning it was exhibiting normal behavior and was not a risk to public safety, a spokesman for the Dept. of Environmental Protection Bob Considine told More Monmouth Musings. If the bear had been a Category 1 risk, Fish & Wildlife officers would have come out. Considine also snapped that "the notion that F&W biologists don’t work weekends is ridiculous and offensive.”

At some point the bear started bounding through backyards in a closely-packed residential area, where some homes are no more than five feet apart. An officer fired once at it, making it very agitated, Cocuzza said. Sometime after midnight, an officer standing about 25 feet away fired seven shots into the bear in the backyard of a home at Edmunds and Florence, in a yard about 30 feet deep. The rear part of its body slumped against a house after it fell.

"I got home around 3 a.m. and my eight-year-old daughter asked me, 'Daddy, did they kill the bear?,'" Cocuzza said. "I told her yes, they did and she got very upset. But the police officer made the decision that this was an imminent threat."

"We've all been second-guessing ourselves," he continued. "But there were just too many people around; there was nowhere for him to go. If someone had been hurt or killed, we would have been getting screamed at for that."

Union Beach has requested a meeting with the state DEP, asking them why they did not respond, Mayor Smith said. The bear's carcass was stored in a locked dumpster on Union Beach town property Sunday, waiting to be picked up by the DEP. Out of the many emails he's received, Cocuzza said one in particular was from an anonymous Fish & Wildlife ranger, telling him in "certain language" the town made a major mistake.

But the town maintains if the state had simply come, it would not have ended this way.

"They told us this bear is not a threat," said Mayor Smith. "I'd like to know how it's not a threat when he's in a residential area. This is not something we're used to seeing in Union Beach. Our police don't have tranquilizer guns; they aren't trained in handling bears. We needed Fish and Wildlife officers there."