A student captured the chilling final image of a black bear before being mauled to death by it just moments later.
Some ten years ago in 2014, Darsh Patel, a 22-year-old Rutgers University student, decided to go hiking with three of his friends in the Apshawa Preserve in West Milford, New Jersey.
The group had planned to go for a relaxing walk as a bit of an unwind from their studies, but the trip soon become an utter nightmare.
While out enjoying their walk, the group noticed a 300-pound black bear was following them. It was Patel who decided to whip out his phone to snap a few pictures of the bear as it approached the group even closer.
“They stopped and took photographs of the bear with their cellphones and the bear began walking towards them,” a police report at the time said.
The group fled the scene into the woods when the bear was just 15ft away from them, with them all running in different directions.
Patel’s friends told the police that they last saw him when he was climbing a rock formation with the bear in close pursuit, the record reported at the time.
Patel apparently yelled at his friends to continue running away from the bear and that was the last they heard of him.
The three friends of Patel managed to regroup uninjured, but they soon realised that Patel was nowhere to be seen and quickly called the police.
After two hours of searching, police found Patel’s body with the bear lingering nearby.
A necropsy later indicated that the bear had ingested human body parts and bits of clothing.
Rutgers University, which Patel attended, confirmed in a statement at the time he was a final year student of information technology.
The university’s chancellor, Richard Edwards, said: “As we grieve over his tragic passing, please know that our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and loved ones, and to all his friends and fellow students at Rutgers.”
The bear was shot and killed at the scene by police, with officials finding Patel’s phone which embodied a bite mark from the bear’s teeth.
A few weeks after the deadly attack, West Milford police released five photos from Patel’s phone that showed the bear standing just 100ft away from the hikers in the New Jersey woods.
In each progressing photo, the bear appears to get even closer to the hikers before they inevitably run and the picture snapping stops.
Officials said at the time they didn’t believe the group provoked the bear, though they probably should have moved slowly and avoided eye contact with the animal rather than running.
