Police Seek Man Who Killed Doe With a Crossbow : Drought: A woman watched as 3 deer, apparently driven from the hills by hunger, grazed in her yard. When she saw a hunter take aim, she screamed and the animals fled, but one was hit.

It was a simple suburban pleasure for Melissa Caven, silently watching from her Burbank living room as three deer that had wandered down from the nearby Verdugo Mountains grazed in her front yard.

And then, to her horror, a man with a crossbow slid from a nearby car.

Her scream sent the deer scattering for the hills, but the fatal whisper of a crossbow missile caught up with a 100-pound doe, which dropped dead in a driveway a block away.

“My feelings were just to stop him, to do whatever I could to stop him,” Caven said later.

The urban hunter is being hunted himself on animal cruelty charges, Burbank Police Sgt. Don Goldberg said.

Police suspect that he lives in the neighborhood. His motive was not known, but he may have had a grudge against the deer for eating his shrubbery, as has become increasingly common in hillside neighborhoods because of the drought.

“It’s a waste,” said Fred DeLange, superintendent of the Burbank animal shelter. “It’s a real waste.”

DeLange said deer in search of food and water frequently wander into neighborhoods near the parched hills that form a natural wall along the east end of Burbank. He was uncertain how many deer live in the mountains.

“One less now,” he said.

Caven, 22, said that for several minutes, she had been watching at least three deer as they ate the ivy on her front lawn in the 2300 block of Scott Road about 2 a.m. Sunday.

She also saw a dark four-wheel-drive-type station wagon cruising slowly past her house.

Thinking that the driver had slowed to watch the deer, Caven paid little attention. She grabbed her camera and took several photographs of the deer, which she had never seen so far into the city.

“I’ve seen them up the hill more, but never in front of my house,” she said. “If there wasn’t a window, you could have touched them.”

Caven said she watched the deer meander about her yard for several minutes before the car appeared again. This time, however, it stopped. A man climbed out, carrying what appeared to be a crossbow. He raised the weapon and took aim.

“Knock it off,” Caven screamed.

The deer scattered. The hunter fired, then drove off, apparently without waiting to see whether he had hit any of them or attempting to follow.

Police later found the doe dead in the 2400 block of Scott Road. Investigators found blood-stained pieces of a broken bolt, which the projectile fired by a crossbow is called, in a driveway nearby, Goldberg said.