(12/19/97)
BY DENNIS B. RODDY
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
COOPERSTOWN, Pa. -- On a given year in Pennsylvania, 350,000 deer are shot by hunters and another 45,000 are killed by motorists.
In Venango County this week, for the first time, a deer was killed in a street fight.
Brian Krepp, 18, a high school student with no known history of either bad temper or bad driving, was on his way home from work late Tuesday night when a large whitetail buck dashed in front of his car, crumpling the front fender, smashing the grill and igniting the temper of a young man who hardly knew he had one. At least one like this.
Krepp, who stands 6 feet, 1 inch tall and weighs in at 240 pounds, got out of the car and got into a hand-to-horn fight with the buck, which weighed only 220 pounds but evened the odds with a nine-point rack of antlers.
It ended with the deer dead, Krepp passed out from an asthma attack and Game Commission officials issuing a reminder not to try to kill a deer with your bare hands.
``This,'' Game Commission spokesman Bruce Whitman said, ``is something the general public is not encouraged to do.''
It was one of the few recorded wins in direct man-deer combat. In 1996, the last year for which a complete body count is available, 45,605 deer were killed when they had close encounters with cars and trucks. When the vehicle was scaled down a bit, the odds narrowed. A woman in the southeast was killed when her bicycle collided with a deer and she was thrown.
The general public, so far, hasn't been especially sympathetic to Krepp, who says he never gets into fights and just got very upset when he realized he was going to have to explain the damage to his father's 1983 Toyota Tercel.
``It was just an instant reflex kind of thing, like `you ain't getting away,''' Krepp said.
Krepp gave this account:
He got out of his smashed Toyota, his foot throbbing from bashing the car's interior, and saw the deer standing there, just looking. It raised a leg, as if to run. Krepp confronted it. There is no indication that words were exchanged. He grabbed it by the antlers, the two struggled briefly, Krepp gave the antlers a sharp twist and the deer went down.
He thinks he broke its neck.
Krepp then got to the front porch of the nearest house, rang the bell, sat down and passed out. When he came to, he saw the deer, got angry again, walked over and gave it a kick.
Police called Krepp's mother, Cheryl Peterson, to a nearby hospital, reporting her son was injured slightly after he hit a deer.
``I told them 'I hope the deer's dead,''' Peterson said ``The policeman told me 'Oh, the deer's dead, all right. He beat the shit out of it.''
This area of Venango County, between the towns of Franklin and Oil City, is not unaccustomed to the sight of dead deer, or even dead deer on the fronts of cars. It is just that they usually are strapped down and have been knocked off by gunfire, and normally not in revenge.
``I guess I just did it in a weird sort of way,'' Krepp said.
Weirdness fairly permeates his experience. While he is not the first fighter this year to bite an opponent, he will be among the first to swallow it.
He took a visitor to the back shed, where the offending deer now hangs, skinned, gutted and waiting to be turned into venison. The Game Commission issued Krepp a permit to keep the deer, although a commission representative stopped by yesterday to pick up the head. To keep that, Brian would have had to pay a trophy fee of $10 per point, or $90 in all.
Krepp is a hunter. He even had his deer rifle in his car, but no shells, and anyway, even though he didn't bag a deer during the season just past, this was, well, a crime of passion.
``I wish they would let me keep the head,'' he confided to a visitor.
According to mother, some callers to both the Game Commission and Brian's employer, a nearby supermarket, wish the Game Commission would stop by and collect Brian's head.
``He said they were getting calls saying he should be arrested,'' Peterson said.
The local press has reacted with predictable surprise.
``Road Rage'' blared the page one headline from the nearby Franklin News Herald.
Peterson is not amused.
``They made it sound as if that's what he does -- drives cars and gets out and mutilates deers,'' she said. ``Now they want him cited for animal cruelty? Come on. He did that deer a favor. That deer was going to go into the woods and die in agony.''
So far, Game Commission officials seem to agree.
``This,'' said Whitman, the commission spokesman, ``is a road kill under our classification.''