Labort tests Connect Bear, who were killed by FWC officers to record Collier Man and his dog for fatal attacks

Laboratory results have connected one of three black bears who killed a fatal attack on a man and his dog the day earlier from wildlife officials in Collier County, officers said on Friday.

The results of the necropsia showed that a 263-pound-male bear contained the partial remains of the 89-year-old Robert Markel, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said in a statement.

Test showed that the DNA of the same bear was present on Markel's body, in his house and on the body's body.

FWC officers have not expressly said that Bär is the one who killed Markel, but a preliminary autopsy of the Collier County Medical Examiner found that Markel's cause of death corresponds to a bear attack.

Read too: FWC kills 3 bears, collects DNA in Collier near fatal attacks

It would be the first such bear attack in the state.

Markel was attacked near his house in Jerome, a rural community east of Naples, south of the Big Cypress Wildlife area.

Wildlife officials set several traps and cameras. They killed three black bears in the area and sent the remains to a Gainesville laboratory.

None of the animals that were tested positively for rabies said civil servants.

Wildlife officers still investigate the events that have led to the attack.

In the FWC declaration there were signs of the latest disorders that could have been caused by a bear or bear around Markel's property. His remains were found about 100 meters from his house.

The investigators found that a physical encounter between a bear and a person near the residence, a dog that was recently killed by a bear in the immediate vicinity of the person, and signs that a bear had entered the residence.

The exact consequence of the events remains unclear.

The FWC Directive describes how the agency should react in situations in which a bear is removed for public security. In this case, according to the officials, each of the three documented circumstances required a fatal distance. FWC officers said that the agency does not make this decision lightly.

From Monday evening to early Tuesday morning, the FWC employee removed the three adult male bears single with a weight of 207, 263 and £ 434. The FWC said there was an unsuccessful attempt to catch a fourth bear; However, DNA evidence was collected.

The three carcasses were immediately transported to Gainesville, together with DNA samples that were collected on site from physical evidence.

The employees of the FWC -Criminal Saving and Bear Management employees stayed in contact with Markel's family from Monday to Friday and kept near the property near the property. During this time, they only watched a bear in the area that appeared briefly in the late Thursday.

The FWC said that the staff of law enforcement and bear management will stay all weekend.

“We would like to thank the family for their cooperation while navigating this challenging time, and our thoughts stay with them,” said Rodney Barreto, chairman of FWC. “I am proud of the professional reaction and support of our employees for the family because they were faced with an unfathomable event this week.”

Jerome is located in the South Bear Management Unit, which has the third largest population of bears in the state, which will be estimated in 2015 to 1,044. Demographic analysis shows that this population has a positive annual growth rate.

Florida's black bears that were once threatened have increasingly hiked to neighborhoods and privately owned in recent years, especially in more rural areas of northern and central floridas.

Between May 5, 2024 and May 4, 2025, the FWC received 16 bear calls within a radius of 10 miles after the nearby Copeland, which were laid and relocated and relocated to five visits on site, five conquests, three bears, and a bear that was killed in a man.

While it is rare for wild black bears to violate people in Florida, people were bitten and scratched by bears, mostly when cubs, food sources or dogs are present.

The FWC receives an average of 6,300 bear calls annually and has documented 42 earlier incidents in which Wilde Schwarzbären have made physical contact since the 1970s as comprehensive records. Three of these led to serious injuries that required medical help before this incident.

28 of the encounters concerned a person with a dog, as the FWEC statistics showed.

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