Virginia man has claw marks, wild story after bear attack

Published 4:30 pm Thursday, August 17, 2017

POCAHONTAS, Va. – A man was left with stitches and a frightening memory Thursday after stepping onto his back porch only to be confronted by a black bear.

Tony Yopp, 42, of Pocahontas, said he was returning from his parents’ nearby home around 12:35 a.m. Thursday when he had his encounter.

“The way my porch is set up, it’s like a complete right angle,” Yopp recalled. “And I walked up the sidewalk to the two steps on the left that lead up to the porch, so it’s a completely blind spot where I can’t see anything.”

Yopp said even if he had a porch light burning, he wouldn’t have seen what was waiting for him around the corner.

“I just walked up the sidewalk like usual and I put my left foot on the bottom step and instantly when I turned my head 90 degrees, the bear was standing there, standing up on its back legs on my porch in the dark. It was scary. At that point when I saw him, he was standing up and he was way taller than me because he was on the back porch standing on his two legs.”

Yopp said he stands about 5 feet and 9 inches tall, but the bear was considerably taller. The animal’s head appeared to be about as big around as a laundry basket, and a game warden later estimated that it weighed approximately 250 pounds; however, Yopp believes it was even heavier.

“But I think it weighed more than that,” Yopp stated. “I’ve had dogs that weighed about 130 pounds.”

Yopp compared the experience, which only lasted a few seconds, to remembering a car crash, that “it’s just images that are real slow when you remember it, but it was fast.”

“It stuck both its arms out,” he said. “It put its paws under my armpits. Its left hand cut into my armpit, into the muscles under my armpit; and it picked me up. It picked me up off the steps and it pulled me up to it. My face at one point seemed like six inches from its nose, and it showed teeth and I thought it was going to bite me. I thought it was going to kill me. The instant I saw it, it was like it ambushed me.”

Yopp was told by authorities that the bear was likely after cat food on the porch.

“After it picked me up and screamed in my face, it threw me down on my back and on the sidewalk,” he recalled. “It jumped over me in the direction it threw me and ran off that way. And I went in the house and said, ‘I just got attacked by a bear.'”

Yopp was taken to Bluefield Regional Medical Center where he received four stitches. Four claw marks extending from his left shoulder to his collarbone are visible.

“It was like being attacked by a monster,” he said. 

Jordan writes for the Bluefield, West Virgina, Daily Telegraph.