When 53-year-old Linda Gebhardt changed from a customer picking up a car at a repair shop on Manchester Road, into a patient in critical condition with head trauma after being run over by a deer, it was a wakeup call for a number of West County cities.

The Missouri Department of Conservation estimates the area where Gebhardt was attacked has 65 deer per square mile. They recommend no more than 22 deer per square mile. 

It is time to start documenting the number of deer encounters.

After the Gebhardt deer attack, Ellisville Mayor Matt Pirrello was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

"That was something that is so freak, and so obscure that there is really no way to react to it. Have you ever heard of that ever happening, anywhere?"

Well, yes mayor, I have.

In 2008, a buck walked down the sidewalk at the north end of the Manchester Meadows Shopping Center. The buck saw a deer statue in the window of Home Decorators and charged the window, breaking off half its antler.

Next, the buck managed to walk into the The Home Depot store, using the  automatically opening doors at the lumber department.

Town and Country cops responded, and found an angry and agitated buck. They shot the deer, only to have it get back on its feet snorting and kicking. A second shot did not drop the deer. It took three shots to kill it.

Also in 2008, in suburban Washington, D.C., a Maryland man was attacked by a buck, and severely injured after he walked out the back door of his home.

A year earlier, during a rush hour, a deer crashed through the windshield of a car driven by the president of the Montgomery (MD) County Council on the Capital Beltway, trapping him in his car and severely injuring him.

Mayor Pirrello needs to realize that Linda Gebhardt’s injuries are not a freak event but the first, when you have too many deer in your community.  

Some towns tally up dead deer on the roads that have been hit by vehicles and add that into the total number of deer-car accidents.

Other towns, like Chesterfield, only count reported collisions with deer when a motorist files an accident report.

So Chesterfield Police only had 15 reported car-animal accidents in 2011. Do you believe only 15 deer were hit by cars in Chesterfield in 2011? 

I don’t. Town and Country had 21 hit on I-64 alone last year. Wildwood counted 220 deer-vehicle collisions last year and 241 in 2009.

County Police Officer Brad Wood, assigned to Wildwood since 1998, said he is one of the few officers who has not hit a deer with a police car, "protect and swerve."

Proactive approach

Now Wildwood allows deer hunting in certain parts of the city, but it doesn't appear to have much impact on deer-car collisions.

Tiny Clarkson Valley has had archers since 2004, and killed 440 deer.

Town and County hired sharpshooters who killed 187 deer on private property in 2009 and 2010. In the past three weeks, sharpshooters killed 216 deer.

Without natural predators, the deer population rapidly expands in West County. BMWs and other vehicles just don't do it.

The ample vegetation here and suburban good life doubles the life span of deer to 16 years, compared to their rural relatives. The lack of stress tends to produce twins—even triplets, in does.

So, if you had 60 deer per square mile last year, you are likely to have 90-100 or more deer per square mile the next year.    

Cities must get ahead of the problem, and count deer struck and killed on roadways, even when drivers don’t report it to police.

Chesterfield, Ellisville and Ballwin need to have an accurate overview of the numbers, in order to go about managing the situation.

What happened to Linda Gebhardt was not an isolated incident, but it was a warning to elected officials to start documenting the deer population, consider the impact on public safety and welfare, and then do something about it.