Somerville woman describes violent raccoon attack

At 1 a.m. on Saturday, a raccoon assaulted a woman from Somerville after she opened her back door.

According to Boston.com, Katharine VanBuskirk was ready to let her dogs out onto her deck after waking up in the middle of the night to obtain water when a raccoon leaped on her.

She claimed that after the raccoon initially scratched her eye, blood flowed down her face and obscured her vision.

VanBuskirk stated, “I kept pushing it away, and it kept coming at me and coming at me.”

VanBuskirk, recovering from a recent shoulder surgery, used her one healthy arm to fend off the raccoon before tossing it off her deck and going back inside her house.

VanBuskirk claimed that the raccoon bitten her three or four times, once in the calf and once on each hand.

She called 911 shortly after she returned home, and rescuers quickly reached the site.

“The hardest part was that we couldn’t find the little dog and there was blood all over the place,” she added, referring to the woman who assisted her in recovering after surgery.

After being taken by ambulance to Mount Auburn Hospital, VanBuskirk received the first of four rabies vaccinations while medical professionals attended to her injuries. She is grateful that her eye was only slightly damaged and that her dog was found while she was being treated.

She remarked, “I probably won’t ever let my dogs out in the middle of the night again.”

Although VanBuskirk hadn’t seen a raccoon in fifteen years, she was aware that they were present in the Davis Square neighborhood and that the day before the attack, an animal had knocked over her compost bin, which was beneath her deck.