Horrible. Nothing good in a situation like that. My condolences to his family, and to his hunting partner.

If any of you ever find me in the process of being mauled by the bear, please, fire away. I'd rather risk one to the chest on a chance of making it than get mauled to death.

That is terrible. I can't imagine what his hunting buddy is feeling. Prayers for all involved.

As I said earlier, hardly a year passses that at least one, and often several, grizzlies are shot in Montana by black bear hunters. Most of the time the hunter actually drags the bear home and occasionally to the taxidermist still thinking he has a whopper black bear. Now THAT is sad. Misidenified target and poorly placed shot caused this whole mess to start with. That is a bad combination for hunting any game species. It is always a potentially fatal one when hunting bears. Perhaps if these out-of-staters would have had someone local hunting with them who knew what a black bear looked like this tragedy might have been avoided. Finding out the guy was killed by another errant shot makes this the absolute worst case scenario. A real shame.

This is exactly what happened to a family friend many years back. He and his son were hunting black bear, shot one, waited a while, then waited a while. When they finally approached, it got up and mauled the father. His son shot the bear but also accidentally shot and killed his dad. The world loses another good man...

You're the coroner. You find that, technically, the bullet wound was fatal. You also know that the guy was dead anyway. Do you release the finding? Obviously it's a judgment call, but I'm not sure that I would have.

Ontario,
Montana actually requires all bear hunters to pass a bear identification quiz before than can legally hunt bear. With that said, I took it just for the fun of it, and having just read the information,it was relatively easy. And how well that translates to the field is obviously a little flawed considering they shot a grizzly to begin with.
I do agree that the initial shot was misplaced or under powered even if for a smaller black bear. But the fatal shot as stated in the article "passed through the bear before it got to him." There is no indication that shot was an errant one. It hit the intended target. Unfortunately, it passed through the target and mortally wounded his friend. Just asking that you only run with the facts, and not assume the fatal shot was errant. It very easily could have been the fatal shot on the bear as well.

Perhaps I was presumptious saying that the fatal shot was "errant." They haven't confirmed yet that it was another poorly placed shot. In fact, as I read it, they still hadn't confirmed that the bullet actually did go through the bear before hitting the hunter. Simply stating that the bullet appeared to have hit the bear before it hit the man doesn't make it non-errant, but it doesn't make it errant either. We'll need more information. Somehow I really doubt we're going to get anything further that is more specific.

Nothing will be learned from this tragedy if we don't get all the facts. We can't avoid making the same mistakes in the future if we don't know they were mistakes.

I know a lot of my gun friends are going to say Im wrong, but this is why I carry bear spray and not a gun to defend myself or someone else from the bears. Its truly a tradigity for the victim and his family. Prays are with all of them.