FRIENDSHIP, Wis. — When a 59-year-old man hit a deer last week, he did what many Wisconsin residents would do — he put the body in his trunk to take home for the venison.
But before he could get there, the deer woke up.
Like the Monty Python sketch — "I'm not dead yet!" — the deer was not yet ready to go gently into the night.
The motorist contacted the Adams County Sheriff's Department around 7:25 p.m. CT Thursday, and when Deputy Brian Loewenhagen arrived on the scene in Easton Township near Grand Marsh, Wis., about 7 miles southeast of the central Wisconsin communities of Adams-Friendship, his dashboard camera recorded the scene.
Loewenhagen talked to the motorist for about half a minute before the man gingerly opened his trunk.
The deer moved and the motorist pulled the doe out of the trunk. Loewenhagen mentioned a mangled leg and said he would put her down.
But a few seconds later, the deer bounded into the woods on shaky legs.
Each year tens of thousands of motorists in the state report collisions with deer in addition to countless run-ins that aren't reported because the damage wasn't bad enough or drivers don't want to finagle with their insurance companies for repairs. But this time, apparently, the deer got the upper hand — or hoof.
The Adams County Sheriff's Department posted the incident the next morning on its Facebook page with a photo of actors Chris Farley and David Spade in a car in a scene from the movie Tommy Boy with a deer in their back seat.
So this happened last night ...
Caller states he hit a deer earlier and thought it was deceased. He states he put the deer into the back of his vehicle, but once he arrived home the deer was alive and kicking. ...
(The deer refused to give a statement and ran into the woods.)
The Facebook page was updated a few hours later with the footage from Loewenhagen's squad camera.
And it turns out that Loewenhagen is no stranger to unusual calls.
In 2014, he arrested John Przybyla, sentenced to seven years in prison earlier this year, for his 10th drunk-driving offense. Przybyla, who lived in Friendship, blamed his noshing at a beer-battered fish fry for the intoxication.
Follow Meg Jones on Twitter: @MegJonesJS
