The City of Monrovia has been struck with a whodunit. A fiberglass statue of Samson the Bear, a city mascot, has been reported missing from the former campus of Mount Sierra College, which closed down in June 2019. A citywide hunt has ensued.
It’s a “fun mystery,” said Mayor Tom Adams.
Samson has been popular icon around town. The many statues found there are memorials to the real, 500-pound California black bear that wandered into Monrovia back in the 1990s. He liked to hang around back yards and hot tubs, was known to snatch the occasional avocado from residents' gardens.
The community fell in love, and essentially adopted him. When he became ill in 1994 and was scheduled to be euthanized, California Gov. Pete Wilson intervened on his behalf, and the residents of Monrovia pulled together $125,000 in donations to build Samson a sanctuary at the Orange County Zoo. (Which, of course, included a swimming pool.)
Samson died in May 2001; but over the years, the city has erected dozens of statues in tribute to the beloved mascot. The missing rendition was appropriately styled as a scholar, given its home outside Mount Sierra College. It sported a monogrammed cardigan and mortarboard cap.
City employee Kerri Zessau oversees Monrovia’s arts program, which installed several statues of Samson around the city in 2011. Since then, she has had a special place in her heart for Samson.
“It really was a cute, little graduate bear,” she told The San Gabriel Valley Tribune of the missing Mount Sierra College statue.
Zessau has since spearheaded the search for “Scholar Samson,” tracking down former college administrators and even touring the facility post-closure, now being used by a mattress company.
Samson was nowhere to be found.
“I can tell you I walked that entire building,” Zessau told The Tribune. “I told my boss, ‘Unless he’s hiding behind a locked door, he wasn’t there.’”
While the search remains hot for Scholar Samson, Monrovians can still enjoy any number of the nine thematic bear statues scattered around the city.