The boy who lived… by outrunning a black bear.
You’ve got to think that this kid is going to have tremendous street cred at school from here on out. A boy by the name of Cole Frazee will forever have a story to tell at the party or get-together that one-ups everyone else’s. He stood face to face with a black bear, and survived.
According to CBS Pittsburgh, Cole and his dad had stopped by a Family Dollar store in Markleysburg, Pennsylvania and things were business as usual at first. The 11-year-old had gotten out of the car before his father and went into the store, and after a while, he came back out to see what was taking his dad so long to get out of the car.
That’s when Cole got dangerously close to a black bear that was hanging out right outside the Family Dollar. The kid couldn’t believe his eyes, and figured that the old saying of animals being “more scared of us than we are of them” would ring true. However, the bear started running towards Cole, forcing him to flee for his life:
“When it runs after me, I turn around, I run in the store, I’m screaming and stuff. The thing was like a foot and a half away from me. I took a left and the bear went straight.”
Running into the store rather than running away outside probably saved Cole Frazee’s life. The layout of the dollar store confused the bear, and the aisles gave the 11-year-old cover. Once he saw an opportunity to get back to the front of the store, he did so, and sought help from the only other person inside: a female store employee.
Cole and her both got up on top of the counter at the front to scope out the store and see if they could spot the wild animal inside. Once they saw that it was headed towards the very back of the Family Dollar, they saw their opportunity to get the heck out of dodge and took it, as Cole explained:
“She grabbed her coat, the keys and the phone and we ran out of there. When we ran out of there, we all got in the car.”
Once Frazee and the store employee were in the locked car, they felt safe. The black bear stayed inside the Family Dollar for 10 minutes or so, and security cameras even captured the big ol’ creature jumping over the same counter that Frazee and the Family Dollar employee had been standing on minutes prior.
Eventually, the bear found its way back out of the Family Dollar and returned to the wild. Cole Frazee, the boy who ran faster and outsmarted the apex predator, was finally able to relax, and knew that what he had just experiences was a very close call:
“I was like, ‘I’m probably going to get eaten by a bear.’ I was relieved. It was definitely a crazy experience.”
