Catskill Bear Snatches Infant From Stroller And Kills Her
By
Winnie Hu
Aug. 20, 2002
A young black bear killed a 5-month-old girl outside her family's summer bungalow in a Catskill resort yesterday afternoon, snatching the sleeping baby from her stroller while the mother took her two other children to safety.
The bear ran into the woods of Fallsburg, N.Y., with the girl, but dropped her moments later as horrified members of an Orthodox Jewish vacation colony screamed and chased after it.
The baby, Esther Schwimmer, was taken by ambulance to Ellenville Regional Hospital and pronounced dead on arrival around 3 p.m., hospital officials said.
The bear, a 150-pound male, was killed by a Fallsburg police officer, David Decker, who followed him into the woods and shot him once with a .40-caliber pistol as the bear tried to climb a tree. The bear's body was taken to a state laboratory in Delmar, N.Y., to be tested for rabies and other diseases.
Officials from the State Department of Environmental Conservation said it was the first time they could remember a bear mauling a human to death in the wild in New York, though bear attacks have been reported in the past.
''Most bears usually shy away from humans,'' said Peter Constantakes, a spokesman for the department. ''Bears are not usually predatory creatures at all. In most cases, they are wary of humans.''
The last known attack in which a human was killed by a bear in New York was in 1987, when two polar bears mauled and killed an 11-year-old boy who climbed a fence at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn and sneaked into the polar bear enclosure.
The bear in Fallsburg yesterday was believed to be about 2 years old, and had not been tagged -- an indication that he had not been involved in previous encounters with humans, Mr. Constantakes said. The department has received about 40 nuisance complaints about bears this year in the lower Hudson Valley, including four in Sullivan County, where Fallsburg is located.
The Fallsburg police chief, Brent L. Lawrence, said the dead girl's mother, identified by family friends as Rachel Schwimmer, was playing in a grassy area with her three children near the Ohel Faiga Summer Cottages, a group of 20 or so worn buildings frequented by families from the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When she heard warning cries from neighbors, she grabbed the two older children and took them to the bungalow, the police chief said. While she was gone, the bear picked up the infant in his mouth and ran, chased by several bungalow residents. They wrapped the girl in a blanket and carried her to the ambulance.
Officer Decker said that when he arrived at the attack scene, bystanders pointed him to the woods. He soon came face to face with the bear, which stood about 5 feet tall, and shot him.
''I didn't want to see anyone else get hurt,'' he said. ''The bear wasn't leaving, it was just staying there.''
Chief Lawrence said that drought conditions may have destroyed some of the bear's natural food sources, and forced him to wander farther afield in search for food. There were reports of a second bear in the area, but police officers did not find any others yesterday afternoon.
''We get reports of bears quite often, but usually it's a brief sighting,'' the police chief said. ''This is probably a situation where a bear was foraging for food.''
Steve Levine, the town supervisor, said that development of second homes in what once used to be woods, along with a decline in hunting in recent years, had helped bring bears and humans into closer contact. ''It's a shock,'' he said. ''But just like there are crazy people, I'm sure there are crazy bears. I think this was a terrible, freaky thing.''
