Cocaine Bear, Star of Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall
The Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington sells souvenirs from the ordinary (t-shirts) to the quirky (Colonel Sanders figurines, “Kentucky Kicks Ass” hats, and petrified horse turds) and everything in between. Though I am overall underwhelmed with my visit, the star attraction does not let down. “Cocaine Bear” is a taxidermized black bear who overdosed on the drug in a Georgia forest in 1985.
Andrew Carter Thornton II, wealthy son of an elite Kentucky horse-breeding family, was a Lexington narcotics cop-turned lawyer. That September, Thornton flew a Cessna stashed with hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Colombia.
Accounts differ as to the reason, but Thornton dumped multiple duffel bags filled with plastic containers of the drug into the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, then strapped more cocaine and paraphernalia onto his body before parachuting out of the plane. The chute malfunctioned, possibly because of all the extra weight he was carrying, or he hit his head on the plane and didn’t have enough time to open the chute by the time he recovered. Either way, Thornton plunged to his death in a backyard in Knoxville, Tennessee. The plane crashed in North Carolina.
Authorities eventually discovered the contents of one of the bags. It had been ripped opened and the cocaine ingested by a 175-pound American black bear lying dead nearby. The bear had not consumed all of it; the results of a necropsy indicated that the bear had probably ingested three to four grams of cocaine before suffering fatal complications.
The bear was taxidermized and eventually wound up in the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall. His story was turned into a heavily fictionalized movie.
But that’s not all the store has to offer. There is a life-sized cardboard cutout of KFC founder Colonel Sanders, as well as a statue of Eric C. Conn, a Kentucky attorney who orchestrated the largest Social Security fraud in U.S. history. You can even buy turds from famous racehorses. In other words, if it’s something iconic about Kentucky, it’s probably at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall. And the stranger the better.
Note: There are multiple reports of the Cocaine Bear incident with conflicting or inconsistent information. I have ascertained what I feel is the best possible summary based on these reports.
Visited: August 5, 2021
Create Your Own Website With Webador