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Deputies guide deer out of house, back to woods

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By NEIL JOHNSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 8, 2009

Updated: 11/08/2009 09:43 pm

TAMPA - Pinellas County sheriff's deputies George Moffett and David Littlejohn were familiar with calls of a burglary in progress, a tense situation even without the broken window or blood trail they found early Saturday.

Their apprehension rose as they entered the house and heard banging from a rear bedroom. They weren't alone.

As they approached the room from a hallway, a figure burst out in a heart-stopping instant.

It wasn't armed. It wasn't even human. The flash of hoof and muscle told them they had run across a deer invasion in progress.

"I was prepared for a burglar, but I was not prepared for a deer," Littlejohn said.

The deputies retreated and opened the garage door. They opened other doors. They found some towels and used them, much as matadors use capes, to flush the panicked deer outside, where it bounded into the woods of the expansive Brooker Creek Preserve.

"And off the deer went,' Littlejohn said. "She was never to be seen again."

The deputies originally called a trapper who is contracted through the sheriff's office, but he was on vacation.

Littlejohn, who worked in wildlife and fishery enforcement for the sheriff's office, decided to use the towels to help coax the deer out of the front bedroom and into the garage.

"I didn't want it hurting itself any further," said Littlejohn, 50. "We figured this thing wants to get out of here."

Twenty five minutes later the deer was out of the house.

"You never know what you are going to walk into," said Moffett, 39. "You always have to be prepared."

The deer had a small cut on a back leg but did not appear to be hampered, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office said.

The call to authorities came about 1 p.m. Saturday from a neighbor who noticed a curtain blowing from a broken window of a house in the East Lake area, the sheriff's office said. Moffett estimates that the deer got into the home about 7 a.m. Saturday because a neighbor told him that he heard a noise at the home at that time.

"It was kind of crazy," Moffett said. "I wasn't expecting that."

The deputies may have been surprised but Gary Morse, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, wasn't when he heard of the incident.

"It's not all that uncommon," he said. "Deer have a tendency to go through glass. Sometimes they see their reflection and think it's another deer."

The deputies estimated the deer weighed 190 pounds, which would be large for Florida, where most deer are about 100 pounds.

"They do get that big," Morse said.

The homeowners were out of town so the sheriff's office did not provide an address of the house.

Neighbors, meanwhile boarded the window.

Reporter Neil Johnson can be reached at (813) 259-7731.

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