The Federal Aviation Administration concluded that he had jumped from an altitude of 7,000 feet and gotten his parachute lines tangled with the duffel bags of supplies and cocaine strapped to his waist. Police identified him as Andrew Carter Thornton II, of Paris, Kentucky, a former police officer and Drug Enforcement Administration agent who’d been accused of stealing weapons from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center and conspiring to smuggle marijuana into the United States back in 1981. The dead man was wearing a bulletproof vest and night vision goggles and carried two different pistols, ammunition, a stiletto, freeze-dried food, six Krugerrands, $4,500 cash, IDs in multiple names, a membership card to the Miami Jockey Club, and several inspirational epigrams, one of which read, “There is only one tactical principle not subject to change: It is to inflict the maximum amount of wounds, death and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.” He also had a duffel bag with about 75 pounds of cocaine, all of which was recovered. Myers later remembered hearing a crash around midnight the night before. Myers of Knoxville, Tennessee, found a dead man in his driveway, sprawled out on his back over an unopened parachute, seemingly fine except for a trickle of dried blood from each nostril. That’s the only part of the true story of the cocaine bear where bears and cocaine intersect, and it’s not all that cinematic, but the manner in which the cocaine found its way to the Chattahoochee National Forest in the first place has more than enough plot for a movie. Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. At some point between the time the hunter found the bear and the GBI’s arrival, all of the cocaine disappeared, although, as a GBI agent noted, “the bear obviously didn’t eat 75 pounds of cocaine.” Another agent was similarly suspicious of the empty, cocaine-residue-free wrappers found in the duffel bag, telling reporters, “Something ain’t right, I’ll tell you that.” That agent handed the story off to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and they discovered the bear’s body on Dec. It took three weeks for the story to trickle down to a game and fish agent through word-of-mouth. After about a week, a local hunter, never identified, found the bear and told his friends about it, but didn’t report it to the authorities. The chief medical examiner at the Georgia State Crime Lab later estimated the bear had absorbed about 3 or 4 grams of cocaine into its bloodstream at the time of its death. The bear, which only weighed about 175 pounds itself, ate some of the cocaine and died within about 20 minutes-scarcely enough time to make any grandiose bear plans, never mind hitting the clubs with Michelle Pfeiffer. Sometime in November of 1985, a black bear living in the Chattahoochee National Forest in north Georgia stumbled upon a duffel bag containing about 75 pounds of 95 percent pure cocaine. Unfortunately for filmgoers hoping for an ursine Scarface, the part of the true story of the cocaine bear that involves a bear doing cocaine is extremely brief.
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