On September 11, 1985 an elderly Kentucky man named Fred Myers awoke to find a dead man lying on his driveway. If this wasn’t odd enough, the deceased individual was wearing a bulletproof vest, Gucci loafers, night vision goggles, a large satchel, and a parachute.
When the police arrived and investigated further, they found he also had on his person two handguns, a couple of knives, $4,500 in cash, ropes, and food.So what was in the satchel? About $15 million worth of cocaine…
The police then surmised the man had leapt from a plane and had died due to his parachute failing. (It was also later noted by friends of the man in question that he had a propensity to push the envelope on how late he could open his parachute; so it’s also possible that in the darkness, he simply waited too long to deploy it.)
The man was later identified as Andrew C. Thornton II- a child of wealth turned paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division, turned narcotics officer, and later lawyer, before once again changing careers and going with drug kingpin- one of the heads of a drug smuggling ring in Kentucky known as “The Company”.
But we’re note here to talk about Thornton’s exceptionally colourful life. The subject of today is an unlikely victim of Thornton’s last adventure- a large black bear now known colloquially as Pablo EskoBear or more simply, Cocaine Bear.
About three months after Thornton’s demise, Cocaine Bear was discovered dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia- the same forest where Thornton’s plane (a Cessna 404 which he’d put on autopilot and leapt out of) had crashed.
The 175lb black bear was found surrounded by 40 empty packages that had been torn open, all of which contained traces of cocaine.Putting two and two together, investigators reasoned that the packages had likely originally been full of cocaine before the bear got to them. They further surmised that Thornton must have decided to drop the packages from the plane owing to already being heavily loaded down by the near 80 pounds of cocaine he’d been carrying when he jumped. Presumably, he intended to go retrieve the packages once safely on the ground. However, even had he survived the jump, he would have found that the bear in question had eaten the contents of all 40 containers…
To confirm this is what happened to the bear, its body was sent to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation where it was cut open and its stomach examined. The medical examiner who performed the procedure would later note of his findings:
Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that…
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