It was a normal Wednesday morning crowd at Sadie’s Coffee in St. Michael. Until an uninvited customer burst his way through the Colonial Mall’s main doors.
A young deer, “probably three or four” years old, Sadie’s owner Kimberly Walden said, bolted into the mall around 7:45 a.m on Oct. 25. After a few runs through the mall’s abandoned hallways – most businesses hadn’t opened for the day, thankfully – Walden’s chef, Mike, opened a back door. After taking a glance around, the deer, bloodied from broken glass, shot outside again, and eventually made his way into a nearby cornfield.
“I saw him coming down [Highway] 241 and though, ‘What on earth is a dog doing running down the highway?’ Then I realized it was a deer. I tracked him. I could see him find the entrance to the parking lot, and he was coming full speed because he’d been spooked by the cars on a highway. He was headed for our [Sadie’s] cafe doors, but he veered left because of a car and he just shot through those main doors,” Walden said. “It was unbelievable.”
The fact the deer didn’t come through Sadie’s doors was probably a Godsend, Walden added.
“People were sitting down, eating breakfast. He could have done a lot of damage in here. As it is, Brownie [Richard Brown, owner of Midwest Rubs and Walden’s husband] already has the door fixed and we’ve been cleaning up the glass and the blood as we can. We have one of his antlers. Not sure where the other one ended up. I hope he’s ok, because he was a big boy,” Walden said.
Here’s some video from the cafe’s surveillance camera: