Bear with sweet tooth crashes kid's party

By EMILY RUSSO MILLER
JUNEAU EMPIRE

A black bear with a sweet tooth crashed a little kid’s birthday party on Saturday. Literally.

The uninvited guest shimmied its way up onto the roof of a Starr Hill home, crashed through a skylight and landed in the middle of Alicia Bishop’s and Glenn Merrill’s living room, the homeowners say.

“I was literally in the room, and I heard this cracking,” Merrill said in an interview Tuesday, referring to the sound of the skylight’s two layers of plexiglass creaking under the bear’s weight. “And the next thing you know, there’s this bear that, I mean, literally, fell right from (the skylight). It was like three feet away from me.”

The 45-year-old dad, whose infant son Jackson was in the adjoining room at the time, locked eyes with the bear. They stared at each other in disbelief, he said.

“I don’t know who was more stunned,” he said. “I think, both.”

Merrill reacted quickly. He hollered for his parents to take Jackson upstairs to safety and he ran into the adjacent room and closed the door behind him.

The dazed bear quickly recovered from its fall. It then calmly wandered over to the living room table, replete with a spread of birthday treats, and helped itself to some lemon blueberry and peanut butter cupcakes.

The bear enjoyed the red and green cupcake frosting while Bishop opened a door on the other side of the room that led to the backyard. The couple then yelled and “shooed” at the bear until it casually ambled out the door.

Read more: http://juneauempire.com/local/2014-06-25/bear-sweet-tooth-crashes-kids-party#.U6wfhcdn9_M