Deer breaks into local shop through window
BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer

MILLTOWN — A North Main Street shop incurred over $1,000 in damages after a deer jumped through a glass window and smashed cabinets and displays Sunday afternoon.

Hanna’s Florist was closed at the time, but police were called by several witnesses around 12:15 p.m. that the deer was in the store, Milltown Lt. Douglass Cole said.

Shop owner Richard Hanna arrived shortly thereafter, and said the stench of blood was overwhelming. The deer had cut itself badly, he said, and blood was everywhere.

“The odor was unbelievable,” Hanna said. “It was a mess. It was all over walls, because he was jumping all over trying to get out the windows. Wherever he went, he had a dead end.”

Though Hanna was unprepared for the scene, his shock began at the mere mention of what was happening to his store.

“They called me up and said, ‘You’ve got a doe in your store,’ and I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

Cole said the deer had been spotted wandering around Main Street all morning Sunday, and must have been suddenly frightened, because there were no cars passing by.

He said a local hunter suggested that the deer had seen its own reflection, thought it was another deer, and tried to escape through the window.

After Hanna arrived and opened a back door, the deer exited the shop and laid down on the ground behind a nearby garage, leaving a 26-inch-wide pool of blood on the floor of the shop.

North Brunswick Animal Control Officer Jay Carroll arrived at the scene, and determined that the deer’s injuries were too severe, and put the animal down by shooting it, Cole said.

Hanna said he and the tenants from the upstairs apartments spent the rest of the day cleaning, and resumed that effort the next morning.

But Hanna was able to open the store at its regular time Monday morning. In that sense, he said, he and his employees lucked out.

“I can’t imagine what we would have done if we were in here working,” Hanna said. “It’s unbelievable. Who has ever heard of such a thing?”

With Valentine’s Day arriving next week, the timing could have been worse, he noted.

“Thank goodness it wasn’t next Sunday,” he said. “We’d have been in an awful mess.”

When he was informed of what was happening at his store, Hanna said, he imagined the deer jumped through the large plate glass window at the front of the store. But the deer actually entered through a 3-by-2-foot section of another front window, which is now boarded up.

“It dove right through the front window. The guy across at the gym saw him,” Hanna said.

The deer attempted to exit through the large plate glass window, however. Hanna said that a person at the scene told him the deer was lunging into the plate glass window repeatedly, causing the storefront to vibrate.

The gym across the street is near an open field, Cole said, where deer can be seen grazing at night.

“So they are very prevalent in town. They’re constantly wandering around,” Cole said.

But this was certainly not a common occurrence, especially in Milltown, Cole added.

The last such incident the officer could remember in the vicinity was about a decade ago, when the son of a former borough police chief was watching television in his South Brunswick home, and a deer came crashing through a sliding glass door.

Hanna said the shop celebrated its 50th anniversary a couple of years ago, and in all that time, even the possibility of something like this happening always seemed remote.

Nonetheless, Hanna is able to laugh about it, as business has returned to normal. The shop, he said, looks as though nothing happened, except for the window.

But that window, he said, now has quite a story behind it.

“This is one for the books,” Hanna said. “When we do it up, we do it up right.”