WALKER, Mich. — It's a quiet day in Walker, December 10, 2025. A homeowner makes a frantic call to police. For two solid days, he'd been trying to coax a deer out of his basement.
"The deer reportedly broke through a window at some point, like a lower level window, and was in like a back room of the basement there," explained Glass, who has 11 years of law enforcement experience and thought he'd seen it all.
The homeowner had managed to shuffle the uninvited guest toward an exit hatch leading outside. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. The wooden steps leading up had no backing — just open holes between each step. Every time the deer tried to climb out, it would fall right through the gaps.
"So they finally called the police department," Glass said with a chuckle. "I think he was kind of ran out of any ideas he had."
Now, if you're wondering why the police got involved instead of animal control, here's the scoop: Kent County Sheriff's Office handles animal control, but only for domesticated animals. Wildlife calls go to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), but their response time was going to be lengthy.
"Sometimes we are because of our availability. Sometimes we're kind of the catch all," Glass explained. "So people call us for a lot of various different things. It's not always just crime, and so we got to kind of improvise and handle the situation that we're dealt with."
And improvise they did. After about an hour of brainstorming, one of the captains had what Glass called "a good idea" — grab a floor mat from the police department to use as a runner down the stairs.
"Then that way the deer could get footing to kind of come up," Glass said. "Then with all of us there, was kind of scared at that point, so we kind of had to assist it gently out the door for it."
The whole rescue was captured on body cam footage and cell phone video, which the department later posted on social media. They dubbed their four-legged friend "Bambi," though Glass admitted with a laugh that the cartoon deer was actually male, while their rescue appeared to be female based on the lack of antlers.
"I don't know any other deers from cartoons or anything like that," he said. "So we picked Bambi."
For those keeping track at home, Glass noted that while deer-in-the-house calls aren't everyday occurrences, they happen more often than you might think.
"A lot of times they go into the businesses with the big glass windows. Sometimes they'll go through that. We've been on those calls before," he said.
After the successful operation, the deer wandered off safely into the neighborhood — no injuries, no drama, just another day in the life of Walker's finest.
"It's just, it's somewhat of a unique call," Glass reflected. "So it's just, oh, hey, this, this squad went down and they had to rescue a deer out of the out of a basement."
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