An 11-year-old girl was recovering Tuesday after sustaining a slight concussion and cuts and bruises when a deer ran her over inside a convenience store in Dacula, Channel 2 Action News reported.
The incident happened Sunday afternoon at the BP station on Harbins Road. Samantha Irons, 11, and her 8-year-old brother, Sebastian, were walking out a door when a deer crashed through the glass and slammed into Samantha, knocking her down.
“I see glass go everywhere, then I realize that I’m on the ground, but at the time I didn’t realize what hit me,” she said. “[It] felt like a car.”
Store worker Amanda Easterling said she heard a boom, then a little girl screaming.
“The little girl is covered in blood, so I call 911,” the woman said. “Turns out, it was the deer’s blood, not hers.”
The injured deer remained inside with the stunned humans. Police rushed to the scene, administered aid, and then ushered the people outside and put the animal down.
In a similar incident last November, a deer ran through the window of a Taco Mac on Main Street in Alpharetta, darted around the restaurant and then ran out an open patio door. One patron was nicked by flying glass in the incident.
A wildlife biologist interviewed at the time speculated it might have been a male deer that saw its reflection in the window, thought it was a rival and charged it.
A more typical incident, also last November, involved a deer and a motor vehicle.
The animal crashed into a truck on John Ward Road near Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in Cobb County. The driver, a Cobb County judge, was not hurt, but the truck sustained $5,000 damage to its windshield, hood and front fender. The deer ran off.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources reports 50,000 incidents of drivers hitting deer in the state every year.
Not all deer encounters are violent. Last September, customers and employees at a Publix supermarket at 1000 Peachtree Industrial Boulevard in Suwanee were shocked when the front doors automatically opened and a pair of fawn darted in.
The deer wandered toward the back of the store, where a couple of store workers scooped them up, carried them outside and released them. No humans or animals were injured.
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