bear

Writer Alex O’Keefe, whom police detained last month in a viral seating dispute on a New York City train, is off the hook for alleged disorderly conduct.

A New York City administrative judge dismissed a civil summons against former “The Bear” writer O’Keefe on Tuesday, ending its case against him. O’Keefe informed his Instagram followers that “the charges against me were dismissed” and “deemed by the judge facially insufficient.”

“That’s legal-ese for [‘BS’],” O’Keefe says in the video as he stands outside the courthouse. “They never had anything on me … they were trying to make an example of me.”

O’Keefe attorney Lindsay Lewis said in a Wednesday statement that the writer’s legal team “commends the Court for reaching the only just and correct result based on the law — a complete dismissal of the case.”

Last month, O’Keefe uploaded videos of the Sept. 18 incident to Instagram. He documented MTA police in New York placing him in handcuffs for alleged disorderly conduct. In the caption of his post, the speechwriter — who is Black — alleged that officials detained him on a train after an “old white woman” complained about how he was sitting. He claimed the woman took issue with the “one Black person on the train.”

The MTA Police Department confirmed it responded to a “report of a disorderly passenger” at the Fordham Metro-North station in the Bronx. A conductor reported that a 31-year-old passenger occupied two seats and “refused to remove his feet from one of the seats.”

Police accused O’Keefe of placing both his legs across an adjacent seat, violating the rail line’s rules. They also accused him of refusing police directions to exit the train onto the platform and to board a following train. O’Keefe delayed service “for several hundred other riders for six minutes,” police alleged, and was handcuffed and removed from the train.

In his Instagram post about the incident, O’Keefe alleged that a friend of the woman who scolded his manner of sitting told him, “You’re not the minority anymore.” He added that police “arrested” him without “even talking to the Karen who reported the one Black person on the train” and that only other Black passengers recorded the dispute.

Police refuted that and said O’Keefe “was not placed under arrest at any time” during the incident.

O’Keefe doubled down on his previous denials of wrongdoing in a statement shared Tuesday, writing, “I was harassed and detained for sitting while Black.

“Today, the court made a clear judgement: I did nothing illegal on September 18. Like millions of New Yorkers, I was going to work to earn a living and support my family,” he added. “Even though this absurd case was dismissed today, I will continue to defend the civil rights of every New Yorker. Every worker has a right to a safe commute.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Prime Minister of Malta Robert Abela spoke of the youngest victims of Israel’s war in Gaza who are given medical treatment in his country.

A hiker who was attacked by a bear — probably a grizzly — in Yellowstone National Park this week has been released from the hospital.

The 29-year old man had been hiking alone on the remote Turbid Lake Trail when he apparently surprised the bear, according to park officials. While trying to use bear spray, he sustained “significant but not life-threatening injuries to his chest and left arm,” according to officials.

National Park Service medics responded to the scene, and the victim was able to walk with them to the trailhead, where he was loaded into an ambulance and taken to a nearby clinic. From there, a helicopter flew him to a hospital. He was released Wednesday.

As is true in the rest of the U.S., bear attacks are exceedingly rare in Yellowstone. Since the park was established in 1872, eight people have been killed by bears, according to the park’s website. For comparison, 125 people have drowned and 23 have died from burns after falling into hot springs.

Even seeing a grizzly bear is pretty uncommon in the lower 48 states. Prior to 1800, they were much more common, with an estimated 50,000 roaming the American West. But European settlers viewed them as a mortal threat to people and livestock and hunted them to near extinction, reducing their number to less than 1,000 in the contiguous U.S.

Thanks to recovery and conservation efforts in recent decades, the population has increased to nearly 2,000, mostly in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Still, the specter of a bear attack, especially by a grizzly, is enough to make most hikers’ blood run cold. While experts tell backcountry travelers to stand their ground and fight back if attacked by a black bear, the standard advice for years has been to lie down and play dead in the face of a much larger, more aggressive grizzly.

That advice has been updated lately, but not by much. A national parks website providing guidance on what to do says, “If you surprise a grizzly/brown bear and it charges or attacks, do not fight back! Only fight back if the attack persists.”

The hiker who was attacked on Tuesday told park officials he thought it was a black bear, but the location, behavior and size of the bear made park staff suspect it might have been a grizzly.

Discovery of an animal carcass near the attack, and confirmation that bear tracks found nearby were left by a grizzly, support that conclusion.

The trail has been closed indefinitely and rangers swept the area to make sure there weren’t any other hikers in imminent danger.

As for the bear? Parks officials say it was probably surprised too and merely acting in self-defense. So the park, “will not be taking any management action against the bear.”

Last year, Jon Kyle Mohr faced a similar encounter with a black bear in California’s Yosemite National Park.

He was less than a mile from the end of a 50-mile ultra-run he had started 16 hours earlier in Mammoth Lakes when he saw a huge black shape charging at him.

In an instant, he said, he felt “some sharpness” on his shoulder followed by a powerful shove that sent him stumbling in the dark. When he turned around, people about a hundred feet away were shining their headlamps in his direction and shouting, “Bear!”

It worked. The bear disappeared into the darkness and Mohr was left with torn clothes and a few scratches, but no more serious damage.

Asked how he felt about the experience, Mohr said he was incredibly shaken at first, and lucky it had happened near the Vernal Falls trailhead, one of the most populated places in the park.

But after a day or two to reflect, he had settled into a more zen frame of mind.

“It was just a really strange, random collision,” he said. “If I had rested my feet for 20 seconds longer at any point,” during the 16-hour run, “it wouldn’t have happened.”