When Stephanie Shown called 911 on Friday afternoon, she’d heard the sounds of a burglar breaking in. The sound of crashing from downstairs startled her in the shower, so she grabbed a nearby weapon, and she locked her dog and herself in an upstairs room as she waited for someone from the Daviess County Sheriff’s Office to arrive.
The sound of breaking glass continued as Shown waited for law enforcement to show up. However, Shown would soon see this was no ordinary burglary.
Eleven minutes later, Shown went downstairs to let Corporal Lee Blanton inside. She noticed a large pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs. Shown, still sure someone was inside her house, ran out the front door, but was told to take safety in an upstairs bedroom instead.
“The officer came in, and he said, ‘There’s a deer in your kitchen. Just go back upstairs,’” Shown said.
Corporal Blanton said in his nine years of public service through DCSO, he’d never seen anything quite like it.
“There was a deer standing about 15 feet away from me,” Blanton said. “I said, ‘There is a deer inside your house.’”
Understandably, Blanton wasn’t sure how to go about getting the deer out of the house. Every time he walked near the deer, it became visibly nervous and erratic. Blanton opened the front door, hoping the deer would run out. Instead, it began running in circles in the kitchen, visibly frightened and leaving blood in its wake. After five minutes of trying to coax the deer out, Blanton saw it escape through the front entrance.
“It took off bolting, running. It was quite a spectacle,” Blanton said.
Blanton said the deer created a different spectacle inside the home.
“I could hear stuff breaking,” Blanton said. “It did a lot of damage inside the house. It had jumped through the back living room window and sent glass everywhere.”
Jordan Camp, general manager for Disaster Team, Inc., was sent to assess the damage done and organize a clean-up procedure for the home. Camp said the deer indeed created a disaster.
“Our disaster team does clean-up for suicides, shootings, and the blood throughout the house was comparable to a scene we go to for those incidents,” Camp said. “There was blood everywhere. It was on the living room carpet, on the kitchen floor, all over the floor throughout the house.”
Blanton and Camp said an explosion of glass had littered the home as well. Camp said the adult deer had crashed through the bottom sash of your normal 3 by 5-foot living room window. Visible damage was done to Shown’s six-foot privacy fence, which the deer had jumped.
Shown’s dog had a bed that was placed underneath the living room window. Blanton said he was glad Shown’s dog hadn’t been in its bed because it was full of glass.
In another ironic twist, Shown said she never saw the deer. However, she did see the aftermath.
“It was like a massacre,” Shown said. “There were huge clumps of blood throughout the house. My father-in-law says he has to stand in a deer stand for hours when he’s hunting, and I just have to stand inside my house.”
Shown was relieved to find out a human hadn’t broken in, even if she has a hard time understanding how or why a deer would.
“My insurance agent is cracking up. He said, ‘I don’t even know what to say,’” Shown said.
Blanton said he was perplexed to answer a burglary call and see no signs of forced entry. However, he wasn’t expecting the first run of his shift to include a frantic, full-grown deer in the kitchen.
