(GoRealNewsNow.com) – In a petrifying discovery, Florida police officers found human remains inside the jaws of a giant alligator and later established the victim was an early middle-aged woman.
You can watch a video from the scene of the tragedy further down this post, but be warned, the scene is quite graphic.
The gruesome incident occurred in Pinellas County in the Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area, The Washington Times reports.
The human legs were noticed in the reptile’s mouth by a local witness, Jamarcus Bullard, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office announced.
He saw the alligator with the human remains in a waterway in Largo, Florida.
“I threw a rock at the gator just to see if it was really a gator, and like it pulled the body, like it was holding on to the lower part of the torso, and pulled it under the water,” Bullard told WFLA-TV, a Tampa-based NBC affiliate.
The witness’s report led Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers to respond to the scene to “remove and euthanize” the alligator, authorities said.
Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is still investigating the incident but announced on Saturday that the victim was identified as 41-year-old Sabrina Peckham.
The county medical examiner is still working to determine where the woman was killed by the predator or died and was dragged into the water.
The responding deputies found Peckham’s remains at about 1:50 p.m. on Friday after pulling out the 13-foot, 8.5-inch male alligator.
The animal was killed “humanely,” according to the sheriff’s office and Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission, as cited by CNN.
According to reports, Peckham may have been homeless. Court records show that in July, she was charged with “trespassing on county wetlands” close to where her remains were found.
She was released on September 8 and ordered to pay a $500 fine. She was previously sentenced for theft and drug offenses.
According to resident Jennifer Dean, other alligators had been seen in the area before. Still, the one that had to be euthanized on Friday over the incident was the largest she had ever seen.
“A lot of my neighbors were out here and they’re the ones that told me about the gator. While we were standing here we heard a shot. I assume they killed the gator,” she told Spectrum News.
Here is the video shot from a helicopter. The video will seem to freeze a few times, but the transmission from the camera in the helicopter is freezing. Just wait a few seconds, and the video will continue.
In Florida, local residents caught an alligator with human legs in its mouth – media
The owner of the legs was found in the same pond where the alligator lived. Now the police are finding out whether the reptile ate a living person or found someone’s corpse pic.twitter.com/5rKLvtr30i
— yalnız kurt (@MApodogan) September 24, 2023