Deer jumps through window of home Cambridge man corrals animal and, with neighbors’ help, herds it back outside

CAMBRIDGE – One minute Matthew Cunningham was watching his wife clean the family’s large fish tank in their home on Route 150 in this small Somerset County town Thursday evening. The next minute he was wrestling with a deer.

An approximately 100-pound doe jumped through the family’s parlor window, trotted through the dining room and entered the office where Cunningham, 26, his wife, Lori, 30, and their son, Zeke, 4, were standing.

“I heard a large amount of breaking glass and I was trying to figure out what did that, and the next thing I know, he [Matthew] has a deer in his arms,” Lori Cunningham said, recalling the incident that happened around 5:30 p.m.

It all happened so fast that Matthew Cunningham didn’t have time to think. “I just kind of muckled onto him and pushed him into the bathroom,” he said.

Zeke, who was excited, couldn’t understand why Santa would send a “reindeer” to his house, Lori Cunningham said. “Why did he come in our house? It’s not Christmas,” he said to her while the deer was in the bathroom.

Matthew Cunningham said his adrenaline kicked in because Zeke was standing in front of the only window in the small office which appeared to be where the deer was headed. Cunningham said the deer spun around in the bathroom and that’s when he shut the door and started hollering for help.

“Matt was so overwhelmed because it all happened so quick,” Lori Cunningham said. “If Matt hadn’t been there, it would have trampled Zeke.”

The family dialed 911 and were told by state police that the complaint would be given to the warden service. The closest warden, who was in Waterville, advised the couple to get out of the animal’s way and let it find its own way out of the house.

As his wife summoned help from some neighbors, Cunningham grabbed the family’s movie camera and went outside to look through the window at the deer in the bathroom. “‘It was curled right up against the radiator under the sink,” he said. There were blood splatters on the floor and wall, apparently from cuts the deer received when it jumped through the glass.

What surprised the couple is that while the deer jumped through two panes of glass and over a couch, it never broke an antique glass lamp that was sitting in front of the window on an end table.

When neighbors arrived, Cunningham removed the window in the office and grabbed a piece of plywood to use as a barrier. Neighbor Arthur Packard opened the door to the bathroom and went inside to rouse the deer, while Cunningham and John Hoak held the plywood up to keep the animal in the office which was adjacent to the bathroom. They eventually herded the animal out through the open window.

The deer apparently had another close call after it fled the house. Lori Cunningham said she heard the squealing brakes of a pulp truck on Route 150 seconds later.

Both Lori and Matthew Cunningham said the entire ordeal was surreal.

“I’m just glad nobody got hurt,” Matthew Cunningham said.