Dan D’Eramo stood between two houses in Northeast Washington, tranquilizer gun above his shoulder, looking up at a tree. At the top: a young black bear. Fuzzy, with perky brown ears.

The roughly 200-pound bear had been the talk of the Brookland neighborhood since he was spotted early Friday morning on Franklin Street. Some residents had brought binoculars. Others had taken the morning off work. Members of the local Facebook group had decided on a name: Franklin.

But D’Eramo, the director of field services for the Humane Rescue Alliance, knew that fairy tale could easily and suddenly give way to tragedy. The drugs in D’Eramo’s gun could sedate the bear, but he would likely need to land two shots, unless backup arrived with something a little more potent.

In a neighboring backyard, zoo police officers were ready to intervene. They were armed with rifles.

Advertisement

At 9:47 a.m., Franklin began to shinny down the tree — toward the small, grassy backyard of a family home. This was not a place for a bear.

“Man,” D’Eramo recalled thinking. “Please stay up there.”

Before the bear crossed into the nation’s capital, authorities had opted to leave him alone. Franklin had spent some of last week in Howard County, according to Jonathan Trudeau, a bear biologist at Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, before making his way to Burtonsville, Md. He was spotted Thursday in Hyattsville, where residents, wandering through the haze from Canadian wildfires, had referred to him as “Smokey.”

One woman, Michele LeNoir, saw a video on Thursday of the bear in the alley behind her townhouse, apparently interested in bags of trash. She said she called the Department of Natural Resources, panicked: “How am I supposed to live in this area when there’s a bear walking around?”

Advertisement

They told her to stay calm and stay away, she said, advice echoed Friday by Chris Schindler, the vice president of field services at the Humane Rescue Alliance. He described the bear’s behavior this week as “normal behavior for a juvenile male bear.” They like to explore new territory, and this particular bear seemed quite calm.

Plus, according to Trudeau, it is difficult to respond to a bear on the move.

The first time authorities spotted the bear sedentary was around 7 a.m. Friday, soon after the Humane Rescue Alliance got a call that he was ambling down Kearney Street. An animal control officer, accustomed to responding to calls for dogs and other, smaller animals, headed over to lay eyes on the bear. She saw him sitting in a backyard tree, apparently calm and enjoying the morning sun.

The officer called D’Eramo. “There’s a bear here,” D’Eramo recalled her saying. “What do we do?”

Advertisement

He arrived in Brookland about an hour later to a gaggle of neighborhood residents peering through a row of houses, watching the bear alternate between eating leaves and scratching his back on branches. There was a chorus of oohs and aahs every time the animal — now well-established as “Franklin the Brookland Bear” — turned their way, his light muzzle newly visible to the growing collection of fans.

“Look at that, he’s found himself a nice little spot,” said Chelle Lender, a 29-year-old neighborhood resident on FaceTime with her dad, showing him Franklin. “He’s probably looking around like, ‘What’s all this hoopla!’”

“If it’s a girl, how about we call her Aretha?” asked Stephanie Rowe, a 56-year-old resident, referring to Aretha Franklin.

“It’s a bear-a-cade,” one D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department official said, before asking people around him to please credit him with the joke.

Advertisement

The officers around him on Franklin Street took out their phones to join the dozens of amateur videographers, laughing as they snapped pictures and videos of the bear in a tree.

Meanwhile, D’Eramo was still waiting between houses with his tranquilizer gun. The plan — he had decided with officials from Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, the Zoo Police, D.C.'s Department of Energy and Environment and the D.C. police, among others — was to keep Franklin in the tree while each agency transported their best bear-capturing equipment to Brookland.

That approach worked for the better part of the morning. Twice, Franklin peered down, swung around a branch and started making his way down the tree. At that point, D.C. police would blast their sirens and wave their hands, and Franklin would go scurrying back up.

Advertisement

“Aw, look at him, that really shook him up,” one neighbor said after a failed descent.

Trudeau, the bear biologist, agreed with her diagnosis. “It likely felt a bit of panic. And if a bear doesn’t know an area well it’s going to do what it thinks is safe and that’s likely why it went up a tree,” he said.

But the third time, Franklin was determined. Despite the wailing of sirens and yelling of officers on the scene, he slid down the entire trunk, landing in the backyard on his four feet. He made eye contact with D’Eramo, a 38-year-old who had never before shot a bear.

“Am I going to take this shot?” D’Eramo recalled thinking. He rattled through a list of what he knew for sure. The bear was calm and had never been known to be aggressive. And the better tranquilizer drugs had not yet arrived.

If D’Eramo shot him only once, the bear would likely have enough energy to flee and then panic — and the adrenaline would make him far more dangerous.

Advertisement

He decided not to pull the trigger, and Franklin turned around and fled, bounding over rows of fences built to contain nothing larger than a dog.

A D.C. police officer rushed to a group of onlookers. “It’s time to go. Secure yourselves in your homes,” he said “The bear is loose.”

Two D.C. police cruisers, one National Zoo car, one firetruck and 10 law enforcement officers raced to 14th and Franklin streets. A couple at a nearby house repositioned their porch chairs to face the backyard where Franklin had been.

Paris Lewbel, D.C. police’s deputy communications director, sprinted up and down Franklin Street.

Sirens blared all over the neighborhood.

And D’Eramo, still without the tranquilizing drugs he wanted, raced up Franklin Street — hoping to keep pace with the black bear.

Around 10:30 a.m., the bear stopped at a house around the corner on 13th Street, much to the surprise of a woman working inside.

Advertisement

Lolita Covington, 59, said she looked out of her window to see Franklin about two feet away, just beyond her back porch. His nose seemed damp, his eyes sort of confused. Covington, terrified, had to sit down and immediately take her blood pressure medication.

Outside the house, D’Eramo hid behind a tree, flanked on either side by Zoo Police with rifles. A few feet behind him, his colleagues at the Humane Rescue Alliance were loading new darts. The stronger drugs had finally arrived.

Now armed with the best equipment. D’Eramo said he knew it was time.

“Should I take the shot?” he asked his supervisor, just to make sure.

“Yes,” his boss replied.

And in an instant, the tranquilizer dart flew through the air and landed with force in the bear’s rear right thigh.

About a minute later, after turning around and leaping over at least one more fence, the bear collapsed in a yard.

Three hours later, he was last seen on the edge of a Maryland forest, where Humane Rescue Alliance employees had released him. Franklin walked down a field where tall grass waved.

He turned back once before plunging into the foliage, his brown, fluffy tail the last to disappear.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c3%2BOaW1oaGlkr6at0WabnGWSp7ywt8uapZ1n