When Ron Singer woke in his tent at the Soda Butte Campground near Cooke City, Mont., and found a bear biting his leg, he “just started swinging,” according to his mother.
The mom, Luron Singer of Alamosa, couldn’t be prouder of her 21-year-old son.
“He was a wrestler in high school, and (his reaction) just kicked in,” said Luron Singer. “He started punching. He didn’t know how many times he punched it.”
The attack occurred about 2 a.m. Wednesday as Ron Singer, who is an engineering major at the University of Colorado Denver, slept in a tent with his girlfriend, Maria Fleming.
The attack was part of a rampage by a mother grizzly that left one person dead and two others injured.
The grizzly and two of her three cubs were captured Wednesday night in a trap formed from a culvert pipe covered by the dead victim’s tent. If confirmed to be the offending bear, it will be killed. The fate of the cubs is undecided.
Wildlife officials called the attack unusually brazen and unprovoked.
Ron Singer told his mother that what woke him was the tent moving around him. Then he realized he was face-to-face with the bear, which had hold of his leg. As Ron punched away, Maria let out a scream, and the bear broke and ran.
In the next few minutes, as Maria ran to get her dad in a nearby tent, they heard another scream in the campground, this from a woman who was being attacked by the bear.
They would learn the woman, Deb Freele, 58, survived by playing dead. She had wounds to her arm and leg. Kevin Kammer, 48, was dragged 25 feet and killed.
Freele, from London, Ontario, said she realized her only hope was to play dead after feeling the bear’s jaw clamp onto her arm in the middle of the night.
“Something woke me up, and a split second later, I felt teeth grinding into my arm,” she told The Associated Press from a Wyoming hospital. “It bit me harder and more. It got very aggressive and started to shake me.”
She kept screaming but then realized that if she didn’t do something, she was going to die.
“I decided at that point, the only other thing I knew to do was to play dead, and I just went totally limp, got very quiet, didn’t make a sound. And a few seconds later, the bear dropped me and walked away,” she said.
Freele agrees the aggressive bear must be killed.
“If it was something that I had done — if I had walked into a female with cubs, and startled her, and she attacked me — I can understand that,” Freele said. “She was hunting us, with the intention of killing us and eating us.”
Ron Singer was released after being treated at a Cody, Wyo., hospital.
“He is doing fine,” said his mother. “He went fishing today.”
After she got the call early Wednesday that her son had been attacked, Luron Singer said that “she was a basket case.”
But that was quickly replaced by one overwhelming thought: “He survived.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
