A large alligator appeared on a South Carolina home’s front porch on Friday, and it took a trapper and several police officers to capture it. The alligator ended up wandering around a neighborhood in Summerville for three hours last weekend, frightening residents.
According to a social media post by the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office, it was “just another calm, quiet day in Moncks Corner… until an alligator decided it was a front porch kind of guy.”
The Sheriff’s Office added: “Upon arrival, it was quickly determined this was not a ‘grab a bag and go’ situation. The alligator was significantly larger than what we are equipped to safely handle under our standard capture guidelines (and also clearly had no intention of following instructions of any kind).”
Alligators in South Carolina have been making their presence felt for the past month as they roam the state during mating season.
“They are moving around quite a bit more (this time of year), especially the big males. So they are coming in contact with people more often,” Morgan Hart, the alligator project leader at the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, told The Post and Courier last month.
A resident caught the wild alligator chase and capture on video
Summerville resident Amy Brandi captured video of the wild scene as officers and a trapper from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources attempted to capture the alligator while it was whipping its tail around on her front lawn. At one point during the attempted capture, the gator hid underneath Brandi’s car in her driveway.
“We just saw all these people gathering outside our house and as we went to open the front door to see what the commotion was, we saw the giant alligator lying right outside the door,” she told Storyful News.
The alligator twisted and growled as it resisted the trapper’s attempts to capture it with a rod and steel cable, repeatedly escaping his grasp.
After three hours of effort and considerable assistance, the trapper finally caught, restrained, and tied up the alligator’s legs so he could remove it from the area and take it to a more “appropriate setting,” as the Sheriff’s Office put it.
“That setting was FAR away from front doors, welcome mats, and any future real estate ambitions,” the Sheriff’s Office joked, adding that “no porch furniture was harmed in the making of this incident.”