A Raccoon Drank His Way Through a Virginia Liquor Store and Passed Out by the Toilet — A Year Later, His Hangover Is Worth $290,000

The liquor store in Ashland, Virginia, had been locked up for Thanksgiving. When staff came back on the Saturday morning, they walked into a crime scene: shelves ransacked, smashed bottles everywhere, liquor pooling on the floor.

The burglar hadn’t gone far. The store manager found him in the bathroom, face down beside the toilet, out cold between the bowl and the trash can.

He was a raccoon. And he was very, very drunk.

Hanover County animal protection officer Samantha Martin was dispatched early that Saturday, Nov. 29, 2025, for what the shelter called a “very unusual call.” Nobody in that bathroom could have guessed that one masked bandit’s bender would become a windfall for her department — or that a year later, local officials would be publicly thanking him.

The Black Friday Break-In

Martin pieced the night together from what he left behind. The raccoon, she said, “fell through one of the ceiling tiles” and then went “on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything.” He knocked out the store’s security cameras on the way in, WTVR reported, so the evidence came down to broken glass and context clues.

The damage: 14 bottles of spirits, worth about $250. According to The Washington Post, the raccoon smashed and likely tasted his way through rum, moonshine, scotch, Canadian whisky, vodka, peanut butter whiskey and eggnog — a menu any bartender would call a cry for help.

“As far as intoxicated raccoons, this is a first for me,” Martin told WTVR. She checked him for the classic signs — eyes wandering back and forth, unable to stand — and did what anyone would do on finding a drunk raccoon by a toilet.

“Obviously I had to take a picture of that, because that’s hilarious,” she said.

The shelter announced that the suspect had been taken in to “sober up before questioning.” After a few hours of sleep and no sign of injury beyond a probable hangover, he was released back into the wild about a mile from the store, “hopefully having learned that breaking and entering is not the answer.” The store, for its part, thanked the shelter for giving its visitor a “sober ride home.”

From Bathroom Floor to ‘Saturday Night Live’

Martin’s photo went everywhere. Within days the raccoon — nicknamed “Al,” for alcohol — had been written up by the Associated Press and The Washington Post and turned up on the Today show. On Dec. 6, “Saturday Night Live” put him on Weekend Update, with Sarah Sherman playing the hungover bandit opposite Colin Jost and Michael Che.

For Martin, it was “just another day in the life of an animal control officer.” She had a gentler take on why the picture hit so hard. “Everybody’s gone through this,” she said. “If you drink, or if you have a bad night.”

The shelter saw something else in the moment: a chance. Almost straight away it started selling “Trashed Panda” T-shirts, with proceeds going to animal care.

Then the orders kept coming.

‘We Never Thought a Raccoon Would Do This for Us’

Working with the apparel company Bonfire, Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter built a whole collection around an illustration of the passed-out raccoon next to a bottle: T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, mugs, stickers. Seasonal drops followed, including “Hot Trash Summer” and, for Halloween, “Trick or Trashed.”

A year on, that drunken night has raised more than $290,000, according to Jeffrey Parker, Hanover County’s chief of animal protection. In a normal year, the department takes in less than $20,000 in donations.

“I couldn’t really believe it,” Parker told The Washington Post. “We never thought a raccoon would do this for us.”

Speaking to WWBT, he described the response as “just remarkable,” adding: “I think a lot of people can relate to it as well.”

The money isn’t sitting in a drawer. It is paying for new housing for the shelter’s animals, toys, a temperature-controlled food shed and a community pet pantry. Parker says he hopes to put some of the nearly $140,000 still saved into an emergency fund for injured animals his officers find in the field.

The Raccoon Who Bought the Body Cameras

The biggest purchase is one nobody would have predicted from a photo of a raccoon by a toilet.

On Oct. 28, Hanover’s supervisors unanimously approved body cameras for the department’s eight animal protection officers. Until now, Parker said, they have had to rely on the county sheriff’s office whenever they needed body-camera footage. The cameras will be used to document animal cruelty investigations and build evidence for court, and to settle complaints about staff. “That way we don’t possibly discipline good officers,” Parker told WWBT.

Axios Richmond reported that about $39,000 of the $65,000 five-year program will come from raccoon merch money. The department had talked about cameras for years, Parker said, “but we never really pulled the plug.”

“This raccoon just helped us a little bit faster,” he said. Officers are due to start wearing them on Jan. 4, 2027.

Not everyone was cheering. Axios noted that while dozens of public comments backed the policy, some residents asked whether the money would be better spent on shelter conditions. But the board’s mood was summed up by supervisor Faye Prichard: “I don’t know when we’ve owed a debt of gratitude to any animal as much as we do to that raccoon.”

Where Is He Now?

The guest of honor, of course, has no idea.

Experts say his bender probably wasn’t a personal failing. Raccoons are opportunistic feeders drawn to sweet smells, Sarah Bookbinder, co-founder of a raccoon rehabilitation center in Earlville, New York, told The Washington Post. She said releasing them close to where they were found is critical, because “they already have communities to which they belong, and areas where they know how to find food and where their dens are.”

And according to Parker, Hanover hasn’t had a single report of a raccoon break-in since.

With the anniversary approaching, the shelter has launched its final Trashed Panda collection, under a slogan that tells the whole story: “One Bad Night. A Whole Lot of Good.”

As for Al, Parker can only guess. “No telling where he’s at,” he told WWBT. “Hopefully he’s living a good life, not doing any kind of more breaking and entering businesses and all that, and living a good life, we hope.”

Then he added the only update anyone really wanted.

“A sober one.”