A British Columbia mother says a black bear followed her two-and-a-half-year-old son up a staircase and through a patio doorway into their home on Saturday.

Eleri Froude of Gibsons, B.C., says she was first alerted to the presence of the bear inside her home around 5:30 p.m. on Saturday when her son said, “Mom, look!”

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do now?’” she told CTV News Channel. “That was when my friend turned around and said, ‘Get the kids and get them in the bedroom.’”

Froude locked herself and her children in a bedroom while the friend attempted to scare the bear away by yelling and banging pots. He also used a chair to push it back through the sliding door.

Froude says her friend tried to shut the sliding door on the bear, but the animal’s head was still inside, so he did something drastic.

“That’s when my friend punched the bear in the nose,” she said. “The bear jerked its head back and that’s what he was hoping for, because he slammed the sliding door shut.”

The friend then took some frightening photos of the snarling bear on the other side of the glass in the door.

Sunshine Coast RCMP say they tried to scare the bear away with an air horn and water bottles, but the bear soon returned to the house, “tried to open the door to the garage and chased a male down the street.”

Police say they consulted with a conservation officer before deciding that the up-to-250-pound (113 kilogram) bear should be killed.

RCMP said it’s the eighth bear they have had to kill on the Sunshine Coast already this summer, after receiving reports of about 500 bear-human encounters.

With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Ben Miljure