Imagine coming face to face with a giant brown bear inside your own home.
That's what happened to Justin Lee Wednesday in his living room in Monrovia, Calif.
“I was just, like, hanging out inside with my dog. I look over and me and the bear just, like, lock eyes,” Lee told KTLA.
What lured the bear in? The plate of home-cooked Chinese food that Lee's mom had left out for him on the table.
It was Lee's dog, Melo, who alerted Lee to the intruder. Lee was in an upstairs bedroom when he heard Melo.
“[The dog] was at the staircase and it was barking louder than I ever heard him bark before,” Lee said to CBS. Lee went downstairs and saw the sliding door open and the doggy door ripped out.
He then made eye contact with a bear.
“I had a really awkward moment staring at the bear, super shocked, and then eventually the bear takes a few steps in…completely inside,” Lee told CBS.
Lee took Melo, ran upstairs, barricaded himself in a room and called 911, NBC reports. As he waited for the police, he snapped a few shots of two bears eating Melo's food outside. Downstairs, the house was a mess.
"The garbage was on the floor, our food was eaten," he told KTLA.
Monrovia police and animal control used bean bag shots to scare the bears back into the woods, NBC reports. No one was hurt in the process.
Lee said the experience taught him a valuable tip about how to live in a foothills area near bears.
“The police gave us a lot of good advice and one thing is, this doggy door might work in a different city, but in this area, it’s probably not a good move, so we’re keeping this door shut,” he said to CBS.
Hopefully these bears are not going to be frequent house guests, like the 400-pound bear residents nicknamed "Glen Bearian" and "Meatball." He got the name after being spotted last May in Glendale, Calif. pawing through a bag of frozen Costco meatballs stored in a resident's garage and cooling off in residential swimming pools. One time, a man walking while texting on his cell phone almost walked right into the bear.
After a few more visits to LA neighborhoods, Glen Bearian was going to be relocated to Colorado.
However, because of a Colorado rule that prohibits keeping bears caught in the wild in sanctuaries, the bear is still living in what was supposed to be a temporary home at an animal sanctuary in San Diego called Lions Tigers & Bears.
Even though Glen Bearian's no longer in LA, Angelenos and others still lovingly follow him on Twitter, where he had quite a sense of humor.