Mama bear and cubs eat 49 chocolate bars left in student's Prius

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WLOS) — Sixteen-year-old Lilly Thurmond was minding her own business, taking it easy at her Asheville home Sunday when she saw a mama bear and three cubs come into her family’s front drive. She didn’t think anything much of it, since bear sightings are common in the wooded subdivision where her home is. But then she looked again, almost doing a double-take when she saw the door to her Toyota Prius open.

“I turned my head, and I saw the car door is open,” Thurmond said, recalling the scene. “I could hear growling and stuff.”

She then grabbed her phone and began a spirited narration of the scene unfolding in her driveway.

“There’s three bears in my car at the moment, three. There comes another one!” she said in the video.

Thurmond quickly put two and two together and remembered she had a box of about 50 chocolate bars she had yet to sell for a TC Roberson fundraiser.

“I’m calling my mom, and I’m, like, I’ve got bears in my car," Thurmond said.

One of the bears, she said, got into the front passenger seat and got stuck for a moment, unable to wedge itself out.

“So, her car was not locked,” Thurmond’s mother Kim Peck said.

Peck said she wasn’t mad at her daughter for leaving the candy in the car, just thankful Thurmond was in the house when the bears arrived and helped themselves to the chocolate. Wrappers from the candy bars are pretty much all that was left of the chocolate after the bears somehow managed to open the wrappers and eat the candy. There were three kinds of bars -- almond, milk chocolate and dark.

Each bar sells for $1. Thurmond had already sold through one box.

“I think I had probably sold like 10 before they got hold of it," she said.

That left about 50. Thurmond found one dark chocolate bar untouched in the car.

The bears left the car's interior dirty and punctured from their claws in the back seat, but Peck said she was relieved to find out insurance would cover the damage without taking a deductible.

She said bears in the area the family lives in have become increasingly frequent, though nothing close to this has ever happened.

"I think we all learned a lesson,” Peck said. “Keep your doors locked because bears know how to open them up."