Grizzly Deaths

October 5, 2003 - It was on this day that Timothy Treadwell (A.K.A Grizzly Man) was killed and eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska. Treadwell's girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, was also killed in the attack.

Treadwell was spending his 13th summer in Katmai National Park where he had been putting himself as close as he could get to grizzly bears. Treadwell's videos about his life among the grizzlies received widespread airplay on the Discovery Channel and Dateline NBC. He also wrote a book entitled Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska.

According to Treadwell's friends and family, his fascination with grizzlies began after a near-fatal heroin overdose. Treadwell had been a struggling actor in Hollywood, and legend has it that his descent into drug addiction began after he lost a starring role on Cheers to Woody Harrelson.

One way or another, Treadwell found his calling in the land of the bears. In some of the last video footage he captured before his death, Treadwell filmed a bear that was new to the area.  This grizzly was diving repeatedly into a river trying to get at a dead salmon. Treadwell admitted on the tape that he wasn't comfortable around this bear. His girlfriend shared similar concerns in her journal's last entry.

One scenario for the fatal bear attack has Treadwell being mauled first, somewhere outside the tent he shared with Huguenard. She may have tried to save him by beating one of the bears over the head with a frying pan. According to the Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man, there is audio that captured the sounds of the attack, but it is supposedly so gruesome that Herzog begged the owner of the tape to destroy it.