Woman has bad record of hitting deer
ANDREW DYS
The (Rock Hill) Herald
CATAWBA, S.C. - Dynamite Deb drives and hits deer. She rides and hits deer.
"Maybe now I'll walk," the damsel dubbed Deerslayer said.
After hitting three deer - two within the past 12 days, the last one Wednesday while riding a motorcycle - Debra Adkins, at 54 years old going on 18, might try staying home at night.
"Hope not, she's my best customer," said Jerry Wingate at Clinton Family Ford's body shop. "Call her the Deerslayer. She's killed more deer than me, and I sit out in the cold tryin' to do it for years. She just turns the key, and they come runnin'."
"I only killed the first one," Adkins corrects. "The other two ran off after."
Adkins is no animal hater, but she's a magnet for suicidal deer. The first hoofer hit her SUV last year on the Thursday before Easter when she was just two houses from her rural Catawba driveway.
She was coming home from bowling in the late-night league in Rock Hill. Direct hit. That buck limped off and died in the neighbor's flower garden. The truck needed repairs but lived.
Then 12 days ago, the Thursday before Labor Day, in a new Mazda SUV, she hit another deer about two miles from the house. Late-night bowling did her in again.
"Dear Hon'" read the note Adkins left for her husband, Bill, who was asleep when Adkins got home that night. "You might want to take my car to work. I need another estimate. I hit another deer. Sorry. Love, Me."
But Wednesday night after a prayer meeting at church and nighttime breakfast with friends, deer coincidence ratcheted into outright bad karma.
Adkins and her husband were riding separate motorcycles - equipped with deer whistles that make noise when riding to scare off deer - to and from church in nearby Charlotte, N.C.
"Somebody told me deer stay away from bright lights," Adkins said. "So I took the main road. Normally, I would take the back roads. Bill was behind me. All the way home, I'm thinking about deer. Deer on my mind. Deer. Deer. Deer."
Blurs with antlers and white butts crossed Anderson Road. She swerved to miss the first but the second one sideswiped her.
Adkins went down in a sliding heap. She survived without a broken bone, but her bruises are deep and she's stitched up like a hand-me-down summer dress.
Two days in a hospital and all Adkins will give up is riding at night. "Two Bibles in the saddlebags saved me," Adkins insists. "And my helmet."
Bill Adkins cleaned the fur off the motorcycle and fixed the bent parts, but he can't say much to his wife about driving and deer.
"About two or three years ago," Bill admits, "I left church and ... one hit me right in the front and side.
"It hit you?" his wife of 36 years asks with a raised eyebrow. Jolts of pain hit her when she laughs, but the suffering is worth it. "You didn't hit him, huh?"
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