One woman was injured and another's property was damaged last weekend in two separate Kootenai County incidents involving gunshots that failed to make their marks.

The injured woman wasn't shot, but received lacerations to her thigh and wrist when her husband used the cab of the passenger vehicle she was sitting in to lean on when he attempted to shoot a deer.

The husband told a Kootenai County Sheriff's deputy that he and his wife were in the vehicle traveling along Thompson Lake Road near Harrison on Saturday when the husband saw a deer standing in a clearing. He pulled the car over, put it in park, left the vehicle and rested his hunting rifle on the cab. The wife remained in the passenger seat. He told the officer that the rifle was pointed directly across the top of the vehicle at the deer.

When the husband pulled the trigger, his wife immediately began to scream from inside the vehicle. The husband told the officer that he immediately dropped the rifle and got into the vehicle to check on his wife. He observed she was bleeding and the window was shattered. His wife was screaming, "You shot me."

The husband tried to call 911, but couldn't get cellphone reception for several miles. Along the way, his wife determined she had not been hit by a bullet but from the glass blown away from the window. They immediately drove to a location where the wife was checked by medical professionals.

The officer reported that an examination of the vehicle showed damage consistent with the couple's stories. The bullet had penetrated the roof of the vehicle, traveled through the headliner, and struck the door frame of the passenger front door. The impact bent the frame of the window, causing the glass to break.

The wife told the officer that her husband would never shoot her intentionally. She said it was a freak accident, and said several times, according to the officer's report: "Please don't get him in trouble for this. It was an accident."

No charges were filed against the husband.

In the second incident, a stray bullet took out a music box in the guest bedroom of a home south of the Spokane River near West Highland Drive.

Kootenai County Sheriff's deputies investigated the incident, which occurred Sunday afternoon.

The woman who lives in the home told the deputies she was in her living room talking to someone on the telephone when she heard what sounded like a crash in the second-floor bedroom. She investigated and found the damaged music box, a broken window, and a hole through the cloth blind covering the window.

The bullet - described by the home resident as "metallic" - was determined by the deputy who wrote the report to be from a rifle, possibly a .223 round. The deputy used a wooden toothpick placed in the holes to determine the trajectory, which was from the southeast traveling relatively flat.

The woman told the deputy she did not hear the gunshot, but she said she does hear them frequently from the southeast. She said people frequently hunt in the woods near her home. The woman did not know who may have shot the stray bullet, but told the deputy she assumes it was a hunter.

The deputy wrote that in his opinion the shot was fired from a hillside about 1,200 yards from the home.