The 11-foot-long reptile was later captured by an alligator trapper following the incident.
An 85-year-old woman was killed by an alligator in Florida on Monday, after she reportedly tried to save her dog from an attack.
The incident went down at a retirement community in St. Lucie, Florida, with WPTV reporting the victim, Gloria Serge, was walking her dog when the gator grabbed it. She attempted to rescue her pet and was killed in the process. The dog survived.
A neighbor and friend of Serge who witnessed the whole attack spoke with WPBF about the horrifying scene.
“I saw my neighbor … my neighbor down and being bitten on the leg by an alligator and being pulled into the water,” she said. “I just remember her coming up and pushing her hair out of her face and getting air and I’m saying, ‘Swim toward the paddle boats!’ She says, ‘I can’t, the gator has me.'”
The neighbor then ran to her garage to find something to either help pull the victim to safety or hit the gator with, but when she returned, “she was not there anymore.”
“Which haunts me right now, there’s nothing I could do, I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t get in the water,” she added.
Officers from the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office and The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) responded to a 911 call regarding an apparent alligator attack, said CNN, before a contracted nuisance alligator trapper arrived on the scene two hours after the call.
“It was definitely a fight,” trapper Robert Lilly told WPTV. “[We] snagged him on the bottom. He never surfaced. He stayed down the whole time. We were able to get a second hook in him and a hard line in him so we could get him up.”
According to reports, the gator was estimated to weigh anywhere from 600-700 pounds and measured just shy of 11 feet in length.
“Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with the family and friends of the victim,” the FWC said in a statement. “The FWC places the highest priority on public safety and administers a Statewide Nuisance Alligator Program (SNAP) to address complaints concerning specific alligators believed to pose a threat to people, pets or property.”
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