Posted on 05/16/2006 12:06:05 PM PDT by dukeman
Manatee woman shoots gator as fatal assaults leave state shook up
EAST MANATEE -- An unprecedented surge in fatal alligator attacks has created a stir among Floridians, including a local woman who used a handgun to fend off a gator.
When a 3-foot alligator came onto Candy Frey's lanai Saturday and attacked her golden retriever, the East Manatee woman grabbed her pistol.
Frey and her daughter managed to push the alligator through a dog-door on their lanai, then Frey shot the reptile four times.
"I was running on so much adrenaline," recalled Frey, 48, a former U.S. Marine aviation technician who has lived in the Panther Ridge subdivision for four years. "I just freaked out and shot him -- boom, boom, boom, boom."
Frey said she was thinking about recent gator attacks when she got her gun.
"People are shook up," said Todd Hardwick, a trapper who captured a 9-foot, 4-inch alligator Monday in a residential lake north of Miami. "It's like the citizens of Florida have declared war on alligators. People are really going crazy."
Last week, a 74-year-old woman in Punta Gorda fended off an alligator with a garden hose after it bit her ankle. The alligator scurried off.
In the latest fatal cases, one victim was a jogger whose body was found in a Broward County canal; one was snorkeling in a recreation area near Lake George, in the central part of the state; another was found in a canal about 20 miles north of St. Petersburg. All three were women.
"These are unfortunate, unrelated coincidences," Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman Willie Puz said.
Although such a concentration of deaths -- all in a week's time -- had never been recorded in Florida, wildlife officials say there is no pattern or common element between them.
Only 17 deaths had been recorded since 1948 before the most recent fatal attacks, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Government researchers estimate there are between 1 million and 2 million alligators in Florida, but there have only been 351 recorded attacks on humans in the past 58 years.
Those gators that are 6-foot or larger are most likely to attack a person; alligators can reach 14 feet in length and weigh 1,000 pounds.
"We still caution everyone: Pay attention to your surroundings. Pay attention to what's in the water. Alligators are predators and wild animals that should be treated with respect," Puz said.
The three fatal attacks have come during the peak of alligator mating season, when the animals are moving around in search of mates.
In populous south and southwest Florida, lack of rainfall has dried up some shallow wetlands, forcing more alligators to find new homes. And rising spring temperatures make the cold-blooded creatures more active in their search for food.
Alligator encounters with humans also could increase as more and more natural habitat is lost to development. "We are building more and more into wild territories," Puz said.
Frey said Monday she's seen an alligator once before in the 15-acre lake behind her home in Panther Ridge.
A metal fence with bars surrounds her property. She said she thought the fence's height and metal bars would be alligator-proof.
But at about 5:45 p.m. Saturday, Frey was in the front of her house when she heard her two golden retrievers, Sammy and Annie, frantically barking.
"The dogs were going nuts," she said.
Sammy was bleeding from his head when Frey walked onto her lanai.
"I have to take this guy out," Frey recalled thinking. "You can't wait to see how long it's going to sit there."
She loaded a 10-round magazine into her pistol and marched back outside. Frey had tried flipping the gator away with a shovel but the reptile kept lunging at her.
Gripping the gun with two hands, Frey squeezed the trigger four times. The shots hit their mark -- two in the alligator's neck and two in its shoulder.
The gator barely bled, she said.
A neighbor called 911 and a Manatee County sheriff's deputy responded to Frey's home in 8100 block of Panther Ridge Trail.
The state sent a wildlife officer to investigate.
Frey said the gunshot wounds appeared to self-heal and the wildlife officer put the gator back in the lake.
The officer questioned Frey about the shooting.
Frey thought she was going to jail, but ended up with a warning citation for hunting without a permit.
I don't know...my son suggested that an alligator on our property would be a definite reason for invoking the "shoot, shovel and shut up" clause. Of course, we don't have too much to worry about being a good distance from any sizable body of water. It would be pretty shocking to find a gator in our yard.
This is indeed, the peak time of year for a reptile dysfunction....;-)
A gator trapped a women in her home in New Port Richey yesterday. I say trapped because there was no way for her to know if this gator was alone or not. They shot him, he went back into water and they then trapped and killed him.
As I'm reading your post, there's a commerical on the radio for E.D.--ha, ha. Very good play on words.
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