Deer busts window, enters GF apartment

GRAND FORKS — A small doe crashed through a window into a Grand Forks apartment Wednesday, creating a bloody scene before police officers caught and killed it.

“It was so badly injured, there wasn’t much we could do,” said Jean Youshefski, an animal warden with the police department. “We eventually had to euthanize it, just to put it out of its misery.”

When Youshefski and other officers confronted the deer, it thrashed around the ground-floor apartment at 2021 S. 17th St. “We were not able to get close to it at all because the hoofs can be really dangerous,” she said.

Ultimately a “control stick,” a pole with a loop at the end, was placed around the deer’s neck after it knelt on the kitchen floor and became more docile.

Using the control stick, Youshefski said, “We basically strangled it. That’s the most humane thing we could do in a situation like that.”

“It had split its abdomen open, and its internal organs were exposed,” Cpl. Todd Riedinger said. “There was no way it was going to survive.”

Adam Bye, 25, said the deer made a bloody mess in his apartment.

“It looks like a slaughterhouse,” Bye said. “The whole kitchen’s red — the whole thing.”

Bye wasn’t at home when the deer broke in around midday, but he got a call from his neighbor, Joshua Dix, who saw the deer go through the roughly 4-foot-by-4-foot window.

“A deer just ran through your window. It’s in your apartment,” Dix told Bye, who initially thought the call was a prank.

Dix, 19, said he and his friend, Amber Bundy, were standing outside an entrance near Bye’s window when a frightened-looking deer came running through the parking lot behind the building and stepped within a few yards of them.

“It came at us and, like, we ducked behind that little wall, and it just, like, flipped through the window,” Bundy said. “Apparently, it just missed his plasma-screen TV, which I thought was pretty cool.”

Youshefski said it’s common for deer to wander through town, often seeking the shade of trees. However, she said, “When they get near windows, they seem to like to bounce into them. I don’t know if they see themselves or what.”

Riedinger said the deer would be taken to Weber Meats in Reynolds, N.D., to be butchered and would be donated to St. Vincent De Paul’s food shelf through the Sportsmen Against Hunger program.

Archie Ingersoll is a reporter at the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, which is owned by

Forum Communications Co.

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