A Germantown man faced a home invader first thing Thursday morning, but the culprit did not have hands, it had four hooves and set of antlers: a deer.
The sound of breaking glass got Carl Manns out of bed this morning.
"I heard a loud crash and I thought my dog might have knocked a glass off the counter," Manns said.
But the dog was not to blame. Instead, Manns walked into his living room where he found the intruder.
"It took a second to process and I was like, 'That's a deer,'" he said.
It had broken through his front window. Manns took a step back, opened his closet door and then peeked around the corner to see what the deer was doing. The army veteran says it was fight or flight, and he didn't want to duke it out with a deer at 6 a.m.
"Honestly my first reaction was.... run!" Manns said.
He thought about trying to herd it out of the house.
"I opened the door and I hear him start kicking around in there and I'm like, 'Nope, nope,'" he said.
Instead, Manns called 911 for assistance.
"Three patrol cars show up and they're laughing thinking it wasn't real. They were like, this is such an odd call," Manns said.
The officers and Manns worked out a plan to try and get the deer out.
"We would just try and basically shoo him out of the house," said Lt. Todd Grenier of the Germantown Police Department.
But the deer decided to make an escape and hoofed it out the back window himself.
"Can't even believe it, he went out this little section right here. This little bit of window," Manns said, pointing out where the deer escaped.
The deer left some hair and a broken antler in the process.
"Officers did check the area and they were unable to find the deer, so we are going to assume it's OK," Grenier said.
As for Manns, he has a mess to clean up after the buck shattered two windows along with some hard feelings towards the deer.
"He can be lunch for somebody," Manns said in jest.
Manns thinks the deer jumped in his window because it saw its reflection. But he had no idea why the buck picked his home, which is in the middle of the street.
