Mounties kill bear that ambled into B.C. family's kitchen

A family on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast had a close encounter with a bear after the animal ambled right into the kitchen of their Gibsons home.

Brandy Bakes said she had just put a bag of dirty diapers on the front porch on Friday when she got the surprise of her life.

"I peeked around to shut the door, and, obviously, I wasn't going to put my arm in front of him because he was that close to me," she said. "He looked right at me and walked into the kitchen."

The mother of two first thought of her children, three-year-old son Kolby and her newborn daughter, Ocean. 

"I ran, grabbed my son by the arm and flew into the bedroom," where Ocean was resting in her crib, she recalled.

"I was scared!" Kolby told CBC News.

With her children in the bedroom and the bear in the kitchen, Brenda shut the door, pushed a dresser in front of it and phoned her husband, Jason, at work.

Jason Bakes has dealt with bears before: one clawed apart his garage door, and last year, another got inside his shed.

"I went to scare him out in the morning," Jason Bakes said of that incident. "I went there beating on a water bottle — you know, 'Get outta here!' It wasn't a raccoon; it was a bear. Yeah, he took a good swipe at me and got a piece of my jeans, and I backed away and hit him on the head with my son's Tonka truck."

Police called

This time, with his family trapped inside the house, Jason called the police.

"I heard sirens, some noise, then shots," Brandy said.

"They tried pepper-spraying him," Jason added. "He kinda brushed it off his face and gave a big sort of rush and a grunt, and they [police] had to do something right away."

An RCMP officer shot the bear twice, killing it.

Last year, there were about 240 bear encounters reported in the Gibsons area alone.

The same day the bear broke into the Bakes home, there were eight other bear complaints from the same neighbourhood. Conservation officers believe the bear in those cases was the same one that was killed.