On Wednesday, Italian prosecutors identified the bear that killed Andrea Papi of Caldes, Italy, last week. The 26-year-old runner was out on his usual course in the Alps when the bear, now known as “JJ4,” took his life.
Prosecutors in the northern city of Trento found that the DNA samples on Papi matched a female bear identified as "JJ4.” The runner was the only person to be fatally attacked by a bear in this region in the last 20 years.
Authorities tracked the 17-year-old bear’s movements through the region with a GPS-equipped radio collar. The monitoring page of the Trento province website was suspended before and during the attack on Pappi due to a faulty signal from the collar.
JJ4 had previously attacked two other people. Now, authorities in Northern Italy have asked for the bear to be captured and killed. They first attempted to euthanize the bear in 2020, when it attacked a father and a son near the same area where Pappi's body was found. However, a court overturned the decision.
Pappi’s death occurred in the Trentino-Alto Adige region, which was re-populated with bears from an EU-funded program in 1999. An estimated 100 bears lived in this location as of 2021, but they may not much longer. Another bear, MJ5, attacked someone in the same Province just last month.
Environment Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin and local authorities have started discussing relocating the animals to other parts of Italy—and beyond the country’s borders.
Papi’s funeral will take place on Wednesday.
Kells McPhillips is a health and wellness journalist living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Runner's World, The New York Times, Well+Good, Fortune, Shape, and others.
