A deputy opened fire on a charging mother bear near the River Run apartment complex in Eagle-Vail on August 24, killing the animal after it turned and rushed him while he tried to haze it away from a crowd of roughly 40 people who had gathered to take photos and video. The Eagle County Sheriff's Office released body camera footage of the encounter Tuesday, showing the deputy retreating behind a boulder and firing several nonlethal rounds before switching to his handgun as the bear kept advancing.
According to the Denver Gazette, deputies had responded to a report of bears near the complex and prioritized dispersing the crowd of adults and children before attempting to haze the bear family toward a nearby river to restore the animal's natural fear of humans. One nonlethal round struck the adult bear's hind legs, but the mother bear then turned and charged the deputy, who repositioned himself behind a boulder before firing the fatal shots. Colorado Parks and Wildlife had already been advised of the situation and was en route to the scene when the shooting occurred, per the same account.
The mother bear was found with two cubs, and deputies remained on scene afterward to give the young animals space. Colorado Parks and Wildlife personnel arrived at about 8:50 p.m. and took the two cubs to safety; the article notes the cubs are now receiving care at a rehabilitation center in Silt, the kind of specialized, human-isolated setting that Colorado wildlife rehab facilities use to keep orphaned cubs from becoming habituated before they can be reintroduced to the wild, according to CBS Colorado.
A Complex With a History of Bear Encounters
River Run has seen multiple prior bear-related responses, the Gazette reports, including an August 17 incident in which a man was injured by bears and cubs near the complex's laundry room. Hoodline previously reported that Colorado Parks and Wildlife policy requires euthanizing any bear involved in an attack that injures a person, which had prompted wildlife officers to set traps and collect DNA samples in the days after that laundry-room injury. It remains unknown whether the bears involved in the August 24 shooting were the same animals connected to the man's injury a week earlier, per the Gazette's reporting.
In its statement accompanying the footage release, the Eagle County Sheriff's Office said officers were “heartbroken” over the self-defense killing while stressing their duty to balance coexistence with wildlife against public safety. The agency explained that deputies attempted hazing first, using non-lethal ammunition to try to restore the bear's fear of humans, only escalating to lethal force once the animal charged.
Bystanders Filming Complicated the Response
The release of the footage sparked local debate, with residents pointing to the crowd's behavior as a factor that agitated the animals before the shooting, according to the Sheriff's Office statement. Roughly 40 adults and children had gathered around the bears to take photos and video, complicating deputies' efforts to safely move the animals away, and law enforcement said the crowd had to be dispersed before hazing could begin.
Drought Is Pushing Colorado Bears Toward People
The Eagle-Vail shooting landed amid a statewide surge in bear conflicts driven by severe drought and a poor natural food year. Colorado Parks and Wildlife logged 6,129 bear sightings and conflict reports between January 1 and August 13, nearly double the 3,115 reports recorded over the same stretch in 2025, as reported by KRDO. By early September, the state had logged more than 8,600 bear calls and eight human-injury attacks, and roughly 300 bears had been euthanized compared with 83 over the same period in 2025, per the Denver Gazette's separate reporting on Steamboat Springs.
Colorado is home to an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 black bears whose diet is more than 90% vegetation, making them especially vulnerable when drought wipes out natural berry and acorn crops. In late summer, bears enter hyperphagia and can roam up to 20 hours a day searching for calories to build fat reserves before hibernation, a pattern that will continue through the fall as bears remain highly active. Colorado's first bear attack of the year came June 18, when a young black bear injured a hiker in Jefferson County's Apex Park, triggering a temporary closure and signaling what would become an unusually severe season for human-wildlife conflict statewide.
Local Rules Aim to Keep Bears Out of Trash
Eagle County issued a public warning on August 18 reinforcing County Ordinance 07-001, which bars residents from leaving unsecured trash outdoors overnight, after unsecured waste was identified as a primary attractant drawing bears to the apartment complex. A new state law, HB26-1342, went further by making it a misdemeanor to leave out food or waste that lures bears, eliminating mandatory first-offense warnings and raising fines for repeat violations up to $5,000, according to Heart of the Rockies Radio. Despite both measures, unsecured trash continued drawing bears back to River Run.
