Bear found dead in Arlington was illegally dumped after car accident

The dead black bear found in a plastic bag near a park in Arlington, Virginia, over the weekend was illegally dumped by developers, officials said Monday.

According to a press release from the Animal Welfare League of Arlington, a plastic bag was discovered near a hiking trail on Spout Run Parkway at 8:30 p.m. Friday. Police suspected there was a dog inside, but instead found the body of a black bear.

“It’s a very unusual incident,” Chelsea Jones, senior communications specialist for the Animal Welfare League of Arlington, previously told USA TODAY.

On Monday, the AWLA announced that the cause of the bear’s death had been determined: a car accident. The bear was later illegally released, the AWLA said.

Transport workers threw bears over an overpass

According to the AWLA, it was notified by the Department of Wildlife Resources around 3:30 p.m. on Monday that a company contracted by the Virginia Department of Transportation had “assumed responsibility for the incident.”

The bear was struck on I-66 in Prince William County, the AWLA said. Transportation workers who did not hit the bear were then called to the scene to recover the bear’s body from the highway.

The workers picked up the bear and then drove to Arlington, where they “illegally disposed of the bear via an overpass onto the Custis Memorial Trail,” the press release said.

Arlington is about a 30-minute drive east of the county where the bear was found.

How was the bear found?

Jones said a local resident found the black bear on the side of a hiking trail in an Arlington park and reported it to police.

Police initially thought it was the body of a dog, but realized it was a bear weighing at least several hundred pounds.

The vehicle was not removed from the scene of the accident until around 1 a.m. on Saturday.

How often are bears spotted in Arlington?

According to Jones, bear sightings in Arlington are about once a year, and the bears are usually searching for their own territory.

“They don’t want to hurt us, they don’t want to cause us problems,” Jones said. “We’ve never had an incident with black bears here.”

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