Mom Rescues Baby Deer That Fell Into Pool

NEW CITY, NY — A Hudson Valley mom responded without thinking to a baby in distress, and now she's a local hero.

It's a truly heartwarming story. The family had just gotten home on a hot and humid day and Danielle Cifuni wanted to sit by the pool with an iced coffee.

"It was in, literally, 60 seconds I heard a bang at the fence and then a splash," she told Patch. "You know how things slow down and you have a thousand things go through your head — I saw the fawn swimming in 10 feet of water, I knew it had to go the shallow end, and I headed to the deep end to encourage it to head that way. But you could just see in its eyes it was terrified."

She wasn't going to just stand there while it struggled. She dropped her coffee, threw her cellphone out of her back pocket and jumped in.

"As soon as I did it literally grabbed onto my shoulder like a baby. It gasped and took a breath and then it started crying," she said.

At that point she was treading water and trying to get to the ladder. Her 8-year-old son had to explain to his dad that this wasn't just another deer in the yard, that mommy was in the pool.

"My husband came and helped me put it on the ground," she said. "That's when the mother came, literally made her own entrance through another part of the fence, and stood there for a minute and stared. Then they both ran off."

Cifuni got out of the pool and found rips across her shirt from the baby hooves that she hadn't even felt through the adrenaline rush.

"It's surreal," she said. "My husband Justin, who never takes pictures, he actually took a photo then posted it on Facebook and it turned into this whole thing. I'm so glad that he did because this is a story we will be telling forever."

This is their first summer in their new home, but they were all already used to seeing deer in the yard — including the dogs, Riley the Maltese Pomeranian and Ripley the brown mutt, shown casually observing the rescue. "My little lifeguards," she told Patch. "They're fired."