Bear mauls woman with cancer isolating in Lake Tahoe cabin. ‘I should be dead,’ she says

A California woman with stage 4 lymphoma was mauled by a bear in her family’s Lake Tahoe cabin over the weekend, local news outlets reported.

Laurel-Rose Von Hoffman-Curzi said she’s grateful to be alive after the encounter, CBS San Francisco reported.

Early in the morning on Oct. 31, Von Hoffman-Curzi heard a banging sound in her kitchen and went to see what was going on. She realized “in an instant” that there was a bear rummaging through her fridge, and within moments of seeing just a flash of the bear’s paw, she was “being torn apart,” she told CBS SF.

“I was bleeding and scared and screaming,” Von Hoffman-Curzi told KTVU.

She sustained puncture wounds, cuts and bruises all over her body, as well as a deep laceration in the cheek that required stitches, KTVU reported.

“I should be dead the way the bear swiped at my face,” she told KTVU.

Von Hoffman-Curzi told CBS SF that she thinks the bear attacked her because she was unintentionally blocking the door it had entered and was trying to get back out.

She finally evaded the bear when she threw a quilt on it and it eventually left, KTVU reported.

“This bear’s been in the neighborhood,” she told KTVU. “He’s not afraid of people. My screaming didn’t frighten him.”

Bear sightings in the Lake Tahoe area have increased over the past several months as bears have begun wandering and scavenging for food in residential areas, especially during the evacuations from the destructive Caldor Fire, SFist reported.

Bears may also be more present in residential areas as they search for food in preparation for winter hibernation, according to wildlife experts.

“Bears like to do things the easy way,” Morgan Jacobsen, an information and education program manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, told NBC Montana. “If they can get into a can of garbage that’s unsecured, that’s left out, they’re going to keep coming back to it, because that was an easy and rich food source that they found.”

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has a DNA profile of the bear that attacked Von Hoffman-Curzi and hopes to use it to locate the animal. As a matter of policy, when a wild animal injures a person in California, the department works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to trap and euthanize the animal, Fox 40 reported.

Deborah Hakam, a neighbor of Von Hoffman-Curzi’s, said the incident was especially shocking because it’s rare for bears to break into occupied homes.

“This is really upsetting because, usually, black bears are not aggressive with people,” Hakam told Fox 40.

Von Hoffman-Curzi told Fox 40 that the front door of her home was closed that night, but the deadbolt was not engaged when the bear broke in.

She added that she would like to see animals that have hurt humans be relocated instead of euthanized, Fox 40 reported.

This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 2:07 PM with the headline "Bear mauls woman with cancer isolating in Lake Tahoe cabin. ‘I should be dead,’ she says."