Local

Boy, 17, talks about killing 350 pound bear in Allegheny County

WEST DEER TOWNSHIP, Pa. — A local teenager was the first resident of Pennsylvania to kill a bear this archery season.

The 17-year-old Deer Lakes High School student said he killed the 350 pound bear Wednesday night in West Deer Township with a compound bow.

Aaron Hwostow said he’s still in shock he killed the bear while he was out expecting to shoot a deer.

“We would have never dreamed something that that would have come in” Hwostow said. “I was just focused on trying to make a good shot. I wanted to get it down as fast as possible.”

Hwostow told Channel 11’s Vince Sims that he never expected his 70 pound bow would kill the bear.

“An ideal shot would have been behind the shoulder, but it was standing towards me so I tried to tuck it in through the shoulder. My arrow went in about nine inches and immediately we knew it was a good shot,”Hwostow said. “It took us five guys to get it on a quad and get it out of there.”

Game commission officials said because it is archery season, the kill was a legal hunt.

“I go to Canada 1,000 miles away to shoot bears, and he shot one two minutes away from his house. You can’t beat it,” Hwostow’s friend, Luke Austin, said. “I’ve hunted bear for a couple of years, and I’ve never even seen one in the wild.”

Officials said the bear Hwostow shot had a tag in its ear, so it had been captured before.

Last year, hunters killed a record number of more than 4,000 bears with bows and rifles in Pennsylvania. Of those bears, only one was killed in Allegheny County.