Oh deer! Tuesday morning, Cynthia Westphal, wife of City Councilmember Kirk Westphal (D–Ward 2), hit two deer on Fox Hunt Drive while driving her two sons — ages 8 and 10 — to school.
Fox Hunt Drive is close to King Elementary School in the northeast section of Ann Arbor.
Kirk Westphal shared in a Facebook post that his wife was only driving 10 mph, so the deer were unharmed by the collision. He said they ran out into the road and bounced off the front of the car before running off into the woods.
“She was driving 10 mph in the snow,” Westphal wrote. “One bounced off the front bumper, the other jumped and tripped over the roof. The deer ran off.”
Westphal, who was not in the car at the time of the crash, added there was no damage to the car aside from some fur being left in the door jamb.
“Amazingly, some fur in the door jamb is the only physical sign of what happened,” he wrote.
Westphal has voted in favor of controlling Ann Arbor’s deer population, specifically the cull of 63 deer last year, and he has used the 40 to 50 residents who kill deer with their cars each year as a supporting element of his argument.
Michigan State police reported a notable jump in deer killed by cars in Ann Arbor in 2015, a 76 percent increase from 2014. Data for 2016 has not yet been released.