Manitowoc Municipal Judge and former city police officer, Steve Olson, has a special memory of late DNR Game Warden Jim Aasen that he’s shared with SeehaferNews.com. Aasen who was from Two Rivers, died last Thursday at the age of 76. Olson recalls he was a 3rd shift officer with the Manitowoc Police Department in June of 1992 when they received a bear-in-a-tree call near North 6th and Hamilton. He said that he thought there was no way there was actually a bear in a tree. He thought it was “someone who had never seen a bear before” and it was actually a raccoon. When he got to the scene, “my heart just sank cuz he looked like he grew up in the Upper Peninsula, and he would know the difference between a bear and a coon.”
Sure enough, Olson says, what turned out to be a 460 pound bear was up a tree. So, what do you do about it? Well they called the DNR, who said they should leave it alone, and it would come down on it’s own. O0lsen had the unfortunate job of telling the neighborhood that they weren’t going to do anything, and “they weren’t to happy.”
Ultimately, someone notified then Mayor, Kevin Crawford and the DNR & longtime warden Jim Aasen showed up. Authorities used a dart gun on the animal but it didn’t go to sleep and it actually crawled down from the tree. The warden decided the best method to catch the bear and not harm it was to try to lasso it from behind with a big rope. As Aasen is approaching the beast from behind, Olsen recalls telling him “You’re stark raving nuts.” He did follow the DNR Warden with a shotgun just in case something went wrong, which thankfully it didn’t.
The animal was tagged and transported north to the Florence/Marinette County line where it was released Into the wild. About a year and a half later, a hunter killed the same tagged bear, which now weighed in at 575 pounds. Steve Olson said in looking back to June of 1992 it was one of the most memorable police calls he ever had.
