Ga. vacationers return to find home ransacked — by a squirrel
At first, Kari and Dustin Drees thought their home had been invaded by a peculiarly destructive thief.
The first-time homeowners, who had lived in their new suburban Atlanta home for only a week, returned from a holiday vacation late last month. When they opened the door, they found a house in shambles.
Wood chippings littered the foyer like confetti. Soot soiled the living room and the couch. The wooden window frames had been gnawed.
They heard the faucet running in the kitchen and feared that a burglar was hiding somewhere in the house. They called police. Kari stayed outside with their baby, and Dustin went in to investigate. He followed the trail of soot — until it dawned on him: It was a trail not of footprints but little paw prints, starting from the chimney and leading to nearly every room in the house.
The destruction, the couple soon learned, was the work of a wayward squirrel.
“He ran across the couch, ran through the dining room. It even went in the bathroom, somehow got in the toilet, and then went in our daughter’s room,” Dustin, 30, an employee of a venture capital company, said last week. “He was just trying to figure out a way out of the house.”
The couple believe that the squirrel must have fallen through the chimney before frantically trying to escape their home. It turns out that a fleeing squirrel can do a lot of damage.
They will have to replace almost every window in their house after the squirrel, in his desperate escape attempts, chewed away the paneling and in some cases poked tiny holes in the glass. He pooped on their beds and on the couch and on the counters and floors. He gnawed off the wood on a door, window frames and indoor shutters. And somehow, the couple thinks, he flicked on the kitchen faucet while apparently trying to leap for the window above the sink.
The squirrel was soon captured by animal control. The worker found the squirrel quivering behind a couch pillow before it “freaked out” and went rogue again, the couple said. “He made a little bed in there — it’s a comfy couch,” Dustin said.
But then they had to contend with their insurance company. When they called to report the freak incident, their insurance adjuster had bad news: The company did not cover damage inflicted by rodents.
Now, the young couple say they are left to pay out of pocket an estimated $15,000 in damages caused by a single rogue squirrel.
Kari, 27, said the experience has left her wondering “the purpose of homeowners insurance,” if not to protect against a disaster such as this.
The couple’s insurance company, Mercury Insurance, could not immediately be reached for comment. But it said in a statement to Georgia news outlets that a rodent caveat is clearly described in the insurance policy, adding that it’s a standard homeowners policy for most insurance companies.
Dustin said the hardest part has been understanding why the insurance company views this squirrel fiasco as being in the same boat as a rodent infestation. He said he understands why insurance may not cover typical mice or insect problems. But this seemed wildly different.
“You see the commercials of the crazy things that happen, or the Allstate mayhem guy,” Dustin said. “You think these things would be covered.”
He said he wishes a raccoon had fallen down the chimney instead.