What Happens When You Bear Spray A Human

Vol. 7

Bear spray is in the news. Investigators analyzing videos of the deadly January 6 coup attempt have turned up evidence that U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was sprayed with a can of Frontiersman Bear Attack Deterrent. If it can be demonstrated that the spray caused Sicknick’s blood clot and stroke, The New York Times speculates that it could lead to murder charges against two of the accused rioters. 

I’m telling you this because I have first hand experience of what it’s like to use bear spray on a human. Several years ago, I employed an identical can of Frontiersman on a home invader. Let me tell you about that incident, and maybe it can shed some light on what Sicknick, and others, experienced that day. 

I heard the guy trying to open a window on the front of our house because I was sleeping on the couch in the living room. It had been a really terrible evening. A friend called me earlier in the night in a panic, asking me to come over and help with her husband, who was acting crazy and threatening her and their infant. I ran over, and found her clutching the kid in her arms, cowering beneath her husband, who had apparently taken drugs—I’m not sure what—and was screaming and throwing things around inside their house. I separated them, and tried to talk the husband down, but without much luck. So I started to take the wife and kid back to my place. 

I’m publishing this piece on my personal newsletter (I’ve pitched it to several publications, with no takers), but you may be coming into it fresh, without familiarity with my work. So, for some background, I’m what most people would consider a big dude. For work, I write about my adventures in the outdoors. And, I’m no stranger to violence. When all this went down, I was living in Hollywood, at a time when the neighborhood was starting to fall into an epidemic of crime. Just on the block outside my house, in the couple of years leading up to this incident, I’d stopped a rape, disarmed a homeless guy who attacked me with not one, but two pieces of rebar, tackled a guy who was high on PCP who had pulled a lamp post out of the ground and was using it to smash cars, and gotten myself into at least a dozen other incidents along those lines. Because of all that, I knew a bunch of the local cops, most of whom seemed to be looking for some excuse to arrest me. 

Anyways, as I was packing the wife and baby out of the house, the husband leaped off their front porch in an attempt to tackle me. The move also put his wife and kid at risk. That was a bad idea. He’ll bear scars from that night for the rest of his life, and likely never walk without a limp ever again. My dad once taught me this lesson, albeit in a slightly friendlier manner: never hit a woman. 

The couple were, before all this, good enough friends that they had keys to our house. I got the wife and kid home, and set up in our guest room, but to make them feel completely safe, I told them I’d sleep on that couch, which was between them and the front door. The ramifications for their marriage seemed obvious, and it was doubly upsetting that this had all happened due to some poor decision making on the part of someone I considered a trusted friend. I eventually fell asleep, but was in a foul mood. 

Cut back to the home invader. He was thin as a corpse, and had a face covered in scabs. Behind him, on the table outside that front window, appeared to be a knapsack full of jewelry, watches, and stuff like that. 

I’d just gotten back from a backpacking trip, and a can of bear spray was sitting there, in the water bottle sleeve of my pack, right by the front door. I’d never used bear spray before, and I’ll admit I wasn’t terribly familiar with what was in it. Animal conversation circles put it forward as a one-stop solution to grizzly bear conflict, suggesting that carrying a can of it in bear country is enough to ward off the animals, which often weigh 600 pounds or more. 

The Washington Post explained the contents of one of those canisters really well:

“Most bear sprays boast a capsaicin content of 2 percent, compared with 1.2 to 1.4 percent in most self-defense products, according to the nonprofit BearWise. The strength of peppers is measured in Scoville heat units, or SHUs, which is the number of cups of sugar water it would take to fully neutralize the spice. A habanero pepper, among the hottest out there, has roughly 200,000 SHUs. Standard pepper sprays have around 1 million SHUs, while bear sprays pack 3 million SHUs, so it’s about three times as potent as the self-defense products. It’s also dispensed more widely and forcefully, the experts agreed. Bear deterrents dispense in a fog pattern — vs. the stream output of many pepper sprays — making it more likely that the capsaicin will get into an aggressive animal’s eyes, nose and throat. Bear sprays are also pressurized to travel farther — 30 to 35 feet — than the smaller self-defense products.”

A can of Frontiersman contains about nine ounces of the stuff. 

I ripped open the front door, grabbed the guy by his neck, and slammed his head into one of the porch’s brick pillars. That left him stunned enough that I was able to drag him a few feet into the front yard, and throw him on the ground. I turned my head, flicked the safety off of the bear spray, and emptied the entire can into his face, from maybe an inch away. 

The can takes about five or six seconds to empty. Before it was fully gone, the guy leaped out of my grip in a display of desperate strength that I didn’t think possible. In an equal feat of speed, he sprinted through our six-foot tall wood gate, tearing it outwards on its hinges. 

I followed, just to make sure he was gone, then went back inside to throw on a pair of shorts and some sneakers. I told my now-wife what was happening, grabbed my phone, and went to find the guy. I wanted him to, at a minimum, spend a night in jail. And I hoped I’d be able to press charges for trying to break into our house. 

10 minutes later, about a block away from our house, I found him laying under a dumpster, screaming and tearing at his face. I reached under and tried to grab him, but he slipped out the other side before I could get a good grip on him. That was the end of his strength. He desperately tried to get away from me, but couldn’t manage much more than a sad stagger. His face looked like a bright red beach ball, his eyes just tiny black, weeping slits.

He made it about half a block further before collapsing in a bush outside the Chik-Fil-A. I called 911, and they told me to wait inside my house, and lock the door. I obviously didn’t do that. 

It took about 30 seconds for the helicopter that LAPD keeps hovering 24/7 above Hollywood to find me in its spotlight. I pointed to where the guy was collapsed in the bush, and they shifted the light to him. A minute or two later, five Ford Explorers came screaming down Sunset. I pointed out where they guy was, and two cops went to grab him. As soon as they got close, they shouted and jumped backwards. 

“What the hell is that?!” One of them asked me. 

“Just pepper spray,” I reassured them. 

Those same two cops pulled all of their fancy Homeland Security gear out of the back of their Explorer, put it on, then carried the guy into the back of the SUV. 

They were visibly pissed that they had to get all of that remaining bear spray inside their car, and one of their colleagues began to question me, suggesting that I'd assaulted the would-be home invader without cause. I didn’t manage that well, but luckily my now-wife showed up, and proceeded to give the cops what-for. It changed their tone. 

I told them I wanted to press charges, and asked two of the cops to come back to our house, so I could walk them through what happened, and so they could grab those jewels, and the guy’s bicycle. No matter what happened, I didn’t want to give him any reason to come back. 

They got there, and looked at my broken gate as I started turning lights on. It turns out that bag of jewels was really just a handkerchief full of plastic costume jewelry. Who knows what was going on there. The cops looked at that, then explained, since we didn’t have No Trespassing signs on the gate, they couldn’t charge him for trespassing. And, because he hadn’t caused any actual damage to our house, or me, they couldn’t really do anything else either. They didn’t want to, but I made them take the costume jewelry and bicycle with them. They rolled that out to the Explorer, and spent five minutes trying and failing to load it into the back without realizing they could just take the front wheel off, before I decided I was done dealing with them, and just went inside and laid back down on the couch.

The next day, I went over to the police station to talk to a supervisor friend about what had happened. When I showed up, he put his his finger over his lips, his arm around my shoulders, and walked me out of the station and around the corner. 

“Cameras,” he explained, before asking what the hell was wrong with me.

“You’re armed, right?” 

I responded in the affirmative. 

“Good,” he said. “Next time this happens, ask if he speaks English, and so long as he says yes, just fucking shoot him. Tell us he threatened you, and that will be the end of it. Never pull this shit ever again.”

And there you go, that’s my bear spray story. I never saw the guy again, and never heard what happened to him. No charges were filed. My house smelled like bear spray for a week. And, pretty much everyone I knew was mad at me for a while, or hasn’t spoken to me since. 

My wife and I live in Montana now, and when people ask me why we moved, I tell them: So I can bear spray bears instead of meth heads. 

They usually just look at me strange, laugh awkwardly, then change the topic.