Burglar bear tears pickup truck apart from the inside out

A Montana woman getting ready for work went out to her pickup truck and discovered it had been torn apart from the inside out by a black bear.

Amy Truett said she woke at about 3:30 a.m. recently to the sound of her dogs barking at something outside her Potomac home.

She got up for work a few hours later and went outside to discover her pickup truck’s brake lights were on and there was glass all over the ground.

The shredded interior, broken window and cracked windshield turned out to have been the work of a black bear.

“We knew it was him because, well, the bear paw prints on the truck and opened the door and tears,” Truett said. “He tore the truck apart.”

The bear had apparently opened a door to the vehicle, climbed inside and started panicking when the door closed behind it.

Truett said there was no food or trash inside her vehicle at the time.

Jamie Jonkel, a veteran bear manager with Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks, said the bear was apparently an experienced burglar.

“The person didn’t really do anything wrong, they just came out and found that their vehicle had been broken into,” Jonkel told The Missoulian. “It was a bear that got trained up by other car bodies elsewhere.”