Editor’s note: Unless individuals hold positions of public trust or there is imminent danger of harm to the public (e.g., active shooter) or there is an exceptional circumstance, suspects arrested/charged will not be named/identified until there is a conviction or a plea deal is taken.

A man was charged with allegedly unlawfully killing a mother black bear in a Willits neighborhood on Sept. 1.

Documents obtained from Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) by The Aspen Times state that the sow was shot with a pellet gun, which punctured her lung.

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On Sept. 1, Colorado Wildlife Officer Peter Boyatt received a phone call at 11:46 a.m. from the Basalt Police Department (BPD) about a sow and two cubs in a Willits neighborhood. Boyatt was told that the sow and cubs were “bears just being bears” and were not causing trouble other than being seen in the neighborhood, documents state.

Boyatt advised police to haze the bears if possible, but Parks and Wildlife would not respond unless further action was required.

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At 12:53 p.m. that same day, he received another phone call from the BPD that the sow was now lying between two houses on Sopris Circle in Willits, bleeding from the mouth, and it appeared to be dying. When he arrived at Sopris Circle, the sow was dead.

He also found the two cubs eating crab apples across the street.

“This is terrible. The mother bear was not aggressive at all. She came onto our property with her cubs (and) ate grass and apples,” Diana Elliot, a resident of the neighborhood, said in an email to The Aspen Times. “Once our dog had her cubs treed, and she just looked at her and went back to eating grass. We got our dog inside and rang a triangle, and she and the cubs left. She didn’t get into the trash or approach the house. I think it is disgusting that a person shot her and cowardly left her body behind with her cubs.”

Neighbors began surrounding the area, wanting to know what was going on. Boyatt asked the neighbors what had happened, but no one was able to provide any information on how the sow had died.

Boyatt spoke to a woman who had been watching the sow and cubs walk down the street earlier that day with her daughters. She said they looked “seemingly healthy” and were heading toward her house. She took photos and videos of the bears that were timestamped at 12:26 p.m.

As the bears approached her house, the woman and her daughters went upstairs to watch them from a window. She then heard her neighbor’s dogs barking and saw the cubs in her tree. She called her neighbor to let him know about the bears in his yard. After that, she noticed the sow lying on the ground breathing heavily.

Boyatt did notice a tree with claw marks and blood on a branch, which he took pictures of.

He then told Basalt police he was going to have to leave the scene to pick up a bear trap and immobilization drug to capture the two cubs. He returned at 2:36 p.m., and with the help of the Basalt Police Department, he captured the cubs with darting.

Boyatt relocated the cubs, a female and a male, together to a remote location in a suitable bear habitat. He and the Basalt Police Department also loaded the dead sow into his truck bed to perform a necropsy later that day, which he did at 9:30 p.m. 

He found that the sow was shot with a pellet gun. The pellet entered through a rib, hit at least one lung, and was found lodged in the opposite rib cage.

The next day, on Sept. 2, at 5:30 p.m., Boyatt returned to the neighborhood to speak with the man whose dogs were barking at the bears in his backyard the previous day.

The man, who is not the man that allegedly shot the bear, said he and his son were inside when he received the call saying that the bears were in his backyard, and his dogs were barking at them. The man went outside and took a video of the two cubs in his backyard with his dogs barking at them.

The man presented Boyatt with additional videos that showed a cub in a tree and later showed the sow on the ground actively dying. Another video showed the sow as she died. The man stated neither he or his son knew what caused the sow to die but were “upset about the entire event,” documents state.

Also on Sept. 2, Boyatt received a text message from a woman that said her mother told her:

“The bears came over to my side of the street, then went back over across the street to my neighbors, then back. She saw the mama bear try to climb the tree by the mailboxes and didn’t get very far and fell back down. She said that this is when she turned and went along the side of my house, and that’s when she collapsed. She said up until that point the bear did not look like she was in any distress.”

On Sept. 3, at 5:30 p.m., Boyatt contacted the man who was suspected of shooting the sow. Initially the man said that the bears were in his tree in the front yard, that he was cleaning out his garage, and turned on his hose just in case the sow would come at him. The man then said the bears wandered off down the street.

The man also told Boyatt he had contacted dispatch earlier that day, worried because there were kids running around getting close to the bears. The man said he went back inside, was getting ready to leave again, when a car parked in front of his house, and the driver told him the sow was across the street lying down in distress.

Boyatt asked the man if he hazed the bear, which the man denied. Boyatt continued to ask the man questions regarding witness statements and the timeline of events on Sept. 1, the day the sow was shot and killed.

According to documents, after some “reluctance,” the man admitted that he did shoot the sow with a pellet gun. The man said he tried to “pop the sow in the butt” to get her to move on. He said he was worried about the kids in the neighborhood getting close to the sow with her cubs.

The man said he did not intend to kill the sow and that he was sorry that she died. When asked where the pellet gun was, the man said he had taken it to work and thrown it away.

Boyatt wrote the man a citation for the accidental killing of the sow. The man is being charged with unlawfully killing a black bear accompanied by one or more cubs, as well as unlawfully failing to comply with the provisions of a license.

On Sept. 15, the community held a memorial for the sow. Posters were made and hung on fences at the entrance to the neighborhood on Willits Lane.

The man is set to appear in court on Nov. 20 in Eagle County.