WALES, Alaska — Authorities on Wednesday identified the two people killed Tuesday in a polar bear attack in a remote Alaskan village as a young mother and her 1-year-old son.
Summer Myomick, 24, and her son, Clyde Ongtowasruk, died after being attacked by a polar bear near the school in Wales, according to officials with the Alaska Department of Public Safety. Authorities said another person shot and killed the bear as it was attacking the two.
Earlier, the bear had come into the community and chased multiple residents, state troopers said. Authorities were not immediately able to reach the scene, which is in an isolated part of the state, due to poor weather conditions in the region and the lack of runway lights in Wales, officials said.
The village is home to about 150 people, most of them Inupiaq, according to The Associated Press. Like many in Alaska’s isolated villages, people in Wales organize patrols for when polar bears are expected to be in town, typically from July through early November, the AP reported. However, Joseph Jessup McDermott, executive director of the Alaska Nannut Co-Management Council, told the Anchorage Daily News that Wales did not have an active Polar Bear Patrol Program “due to lack of government funding.”
Deadly polar bear attacks are rare, though ice melting as a result of climate change has led to an increase in contact between humans and the bears, CNN reported.
A polar bear killed a man in the Alaskan village of Point Lay in 1990, according to the Daily News. Biologists later determined the bear had signs of starvation, the newspaper reported.
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