The pounding of hooves from a male deer could be heard in the education hallway of North Court around 4 p.m. Wednesday.
A buck broke through one of the windows facing North Court’s courtyard before running down the hallway and breaking out of another window. Members of the facilities and housekeeping staff were on scene cleaning up shards of glass after the incident occurred.
Kate Cassada, associate professor of education, witnessed the deer leaving North's hallway after she heard a crash outside her office, she said.
“The crash was startlingly loud, and I could hear that he was pounding his hooves in the hallway,” Cassada said. "I ran out to see what was happening and got there just in time to see it going out the other window. He broke it with his antlers and then his back legs got stuck on the glass as he tried to jump through."
Cassada and her officemate split up to see whether they could find the deer and ensure that it wasn’t injured, but had no success, she said.
Claudia Mills, the coordinator for the Center for Leadership in Education, said she had thought it was an earthquake when the deer had first run through the window.
“The noise stunned me at first,” Mills said.
A number of facilities workers were called to the scene to assist in cleaning up the glass shards and blood seen around the area. John Jacobus, one of the responding maintenance technicians and an avid deer hunter, said he could tell the deer had followed the pathway down the steps to Westhampton Way and when it had come to the street, it had hesitated for a second.
“From the amount of blood and the size of the drops that I see, he’s not hurt bad at all,” Jacobus said. “It would be like one of us getting a finger prick.”
The members of the men’s and women’s tennis teams witnessed the deer running down the path beside the tennis courts, Emily Dunbar, a sophomore player, said.
“We saw him run down the sidewalk during our practice,” she said. “He was a pretty big deer.”
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Cassada said the University Police Department had been called. An URPD officer confirmed the call and said an ongoing investigation would follow. No other eye-witness accounts of the deer have been confirmed.
Hair from the deer was seen on the broken window shards.
For now, the broken windows will be boarded up while facilities workers replace the panes.
Contact senior news writer Emma Phelps at emma.phelps@richmond.edu.
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