A British Columbia father is being heralded as a hero after fighting off a black bear that had its sights set on his 3-year-old daughter on Sunday.
According to reports, it was around 11:30 a.m. on Sunday morning when three-year-old Anaiyah Lekei was playing on the backyard deck of her family’s home in Maple Ridge (just outside Vancouver) when suddenly an adult black bear approached her and mounted an attack.
“She just started screaming, just screaming like I’ve never heard her scream before,” the girl’s mother Andrea Lekei said.
Responding as any father should, Andrea said her husband was immediately in the mix amid the blood curdling screams. She told reporters that just as the bear was going for another bite of the child’s neck, her husband managed to physically pull the bruin away. Despite the tussle, the bear refused to retreat and continued trying to get at the toddler, leaving the father no choice but to find a weapon of some kind to defend his daughter.
“He managed to get him away just as he was about to take another bite at her neck,” Lekei said. “The bear just kept coming back. He had no other choice but to get his compound bow. He did shoot the bear in the head, and the bear at that point ran off.”
Now able to tend to their daughter, Andrea and the child’s grandmother used towels to slow the bleeding as they awaited an airlift that soon took the injured child to BC Children’s Hospital. Anaiyah is said to have suffered deep lacerations to the back of her neck and head and her body is littered with puncture wounds and scratches.
Anaiyah is now recovering in hospital | GoFundMe
Several outlets indicate that the bear took off after the bolt ended up between the animal’s eyes, but authorities stated yesterday that the attacking bear remains at large. RCMP officers did shoot a black bear in a neighboring yard, but a necropsy has since shown that it was not the one that was responsible for the attack.
The Maple Ridge attack is the latest in a string of serious bear encounters in British Columbia over the past week and a half.
A little over a week ago, a 72-year-old woman was seriously injured by a female grizzly with at least one cub while hiking in a remote area near Gold Bridge, northwest of Lillooet. She suffered a broken neck (C1 fracture) and multiple lacerations and was airlifted to Vancouver General Hospital.
Then on Sunday evening — the same day as the Maple Ridge incident — a man hiking alone in the Rutherford Creek drainage near Pemberton was attacked by a grizzly in what officials also classified as a defensive, close-range surprise encounter.
Thankfully for Anaiyah, the latest updates state that following surgery, she is expected to make a full recovery. A GoFundMe has since been set up in an effort to provide relief to the family.
