Deer Smashes Through Window At Downtown Muskogee Business

Best estimates say we have more than 750,000 deer in Oklahoma. One of those made a surprise visit to a Muskogee business Tuesday when it jumped through a plate glass window.

Surveillance video shows the running through the parking lot and then goes airborne. It went head first through the window at St. Francis Hospice, smack in the middle of the Broadway Shopping Center in downtown Muskogee.

Mike Morse owns the shopping center and runs a business next door to the hospice.

"I've never seen a deer here, no, I've never seen anything like that and I hunt I had just never seen a deer right here in Muskogee downtown," Morse said.

Morse says witnesses first spotted the deer several blocks away just outside this travel agency. It bound across two major streets before running in front of Bryant's delivery truck.

"I was really thinking it would turn and go a different direction, I didn't think it would go through the window," said Bryant Morse, witness.

The Morse's may have been surprised, but Mike McAllister with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation says deer are all over the place. They're just usually visible, he says, in the early morning or late afternoon.

"However, during the rut these things can show up anytime during the day or night," McAllister said.

The deer was badly injured and had to be put down by animal control. The good news though, there were no patients in the hospice at the time and the employee who works closest to the window had just gone to lunch.

"The deer came right through the plate glass window that sets by her desk, had she been in there it would have probably scared here to death," Mike Morse said.

When Morse bought the shopping center three years ago the windows had metal bars on them, but he took it down because he just didn't like the way it looked. But he says now he might reconsider and put them back up.