Neighbor Comes to Rescue as Panicked Deer Ransacks House

Panicked deer wrecks MD home

The house on Manning Road in Accokeek looks like a crime scene. There’s broken glass and blood everywhere. Potted plants are overturned. Everything is in disarray from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room.

But the mess wasn’t caused by a violent crime. It was caused by a panicked deer that crashed through the home’s picture window and thrashed about before being shot and killed by a neighbor.

“He tore the house up,” said Richard DePhillip, who eventually shot the animal. “You’d think a demolition derby went through the house. Their house is destroyed.”

DePhillip’s wife, Carolyn, said she apparently spooked the deer about 4 p.m. Saturday while gathering wood in her yard. She said the deer ran across the street and straight into the neighbor’s kitchen window. She said it sounded like “a huge loud boom, like a bomb going off or a major car accident.”

She called her husband and he took action out of concern for a paralyzed man who lives in the home with his elderly wife.

“I come into the house,” DePhillip said. “It was a mess. The deer was tearing everything up.”

DePhillip first tried to wrestle the deer, but the buck hit him in the stomach where he recently had surgery. The deer was too quick and too powerful.
 
“I was surprised,” he said. “He couldn’t grip the floor, but he jumped up to the ceiling and hit his horns.”

The bizarre encounter lasted about 15 minutes.

Steve Wido is the son of the elderly couple who live in the home. He called his neighbor’s actions a blessing, because his mother could not have handled the deer and it took the county four hours to respond to the home.

Dephillip says he has hunted in the past but has never come this close to a buck and never wants to again.
 
“I’m just glad everybody is okay and it all can be fixed,” he said. “An unbelievable experience.”

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