Deer smashes through front door of Dexter business

DEXTER, Mo. -- A four-point buck stopped into LeGrand's Communications on Business U.S. 60 Sunday morning, smashing through the front door glass.

The confused creature entered through the front entrance, charging full force through the glass door. The animal apparently entered antlers first, leaving a portion of one of his antlers inside the store.

Store owners Ronnie and Sheila LeGrand received a call from a Dexter police officer around 10:30 a.m. Sunday, after local resident Lance Espey reported the incident.

"I thought someone was playing a joke on us; and I told the policeman, 'Oh, sure,'" Sheila LeGrand said after receiving the phone call. "The officer had to really convince me that a deer really did jump through our front door. You just don't think about them being this close to downtown," she said Sunday morning as the couple boarded up the front door and remove the tiny glass shards from the front office area of their business.

Espey had first spotted the deer traveling south on One Mile Road and began following slowly behind the deer in his vehicle.

"It turned east onto Business 60 at the One Mile Road stoplight," Ronnie LeGrand said, "and Lance followed it here to our place."

When the deer reached the parking lot of LeGrand's, he apparently saw his reflection in the store's front door and bolted toward it, shattering the entire panel of glass.

According to LeGrand, the deer did little damage inside.

"It really didn't bother any of the displays or any of the equipment," LeGrand said. "We just had a mess with glass shards all over the front of the building."

Espey told police he saw the deer inside the building for just a short time before it jumped back out the same door through which it entered.

"He apparently wasn't at all injured, just stunned," LeGrand said. There wasn't a bit of blood."

After exiting the building, the buck was seen running east for a short distance before taking a northern route up Sassafras Street.