If you need to pee but the toilet is occupied, better not do it in a pond – especially if you’re in Florida and an alligator could appear in front of you at any moment.
Learning the (very painful) lesson was Jordan Rivera, a 23-year-old from the Sunshine State who last Sunday, discouraged by a long line to use the restroom at the Banditos Bar in Port Charlotte (40 miles north of Fort Myers), decided to go out back and pee in a lake.
The company, however, was not very understanding. With a speed worthy of a feline, an alligator attacked the man, gnawing off his arm just above the elbow. Fortunately, some heroic bystanders jumped in to pull him out of the water, bandaging his wound until help arrived.
Asked about the incident from his bed in the ICU, however, the young Rivera claims he remembers nothing of the attack. “Those gators, I didn’t truly understand them until I woke up in the hospital and, ‘Oh, gator got your arm,'” he told Southwest Florida’s NBC 2.
“I ended up walking over to the water hole, I didn’t realize how big it was at the time,” he recalled. “As I was going over there something happened where I either tripped or the ground below me just went down. I ended up in the water.”
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission later located and captured the 10-foot alligator that attacked Rivera and euthanized him, as usually happens to alligators that attack humans.
The attack in Florida parallels another fatal encounter/clash between humans and animal creatures that occurred a bit further north. In New Jersey, on the same day a 15-year-old girl was attacked by a shark while surfing in Stone Harbor. The shark grabbed Maggie Drozdowski’s foot and dragged her underwater. Again, however, tragedy was averted – and the teenager made it back to shore safely (albeit with a badly injured foot).
