Bears responsible for multiple recent home invasions in Los Alamos
Bears broke into two Western Area homes during the night of July 28, a week after two similar incidents happened in Quemazon.
In all of the cases, the bear entered through an open door or window. In three of the four homes involved, the residents were home at the time. In one case, a resident was able to scare the bear into leaving; in the two other cases, the residents barricaded themselves in a room and Los Alamos Police Department officers were able to enter the houses and coax the bears into leaving.
A fourth resident, who was away when a bear entered his house in Quemazon on July 23, came home to find his kitchen ransacked. The resident also told Boomtown that evidence suggested the bear ate food items in the house, including a leftover box of fast-food chicken nuggets it found in a teenager’s bedroom upstairs.
No injuries to humans have been reported.
The New Mexico Department of Wildlife has set bear traps in both neighborhoods, and two bears have been captured so far. Identifying the specific bear involved in each incident is a challenge since the residents interviewed by Boomtown have seen multiple bears of varying sizes and inquisitiveness have been seen in both neighborhoods over the last few weeks.
Several other mountain communities have enacted strong and enforceable ordinances to reduce wildlife-human conflict. Los Alamos County has instead, for years, chosen to rely on educating residents on voluntarily complying with proven measures that eliminate the forces — such as unsecured trash, bird feeders, and chicken coops — that attract bears into our community, increase the opportunity for conflict with humans, and often end with the death of a bear.
This is a breaking news story and Boomtown will continue to provide updates when available.
Read Boomtown’s recent story on the local bear population and ways to reduce bear-human conflict here:
