A newly released video shows the horrifying moments right before an 85-year-old woman was dragged to her death by a 10-foot-long alligator in Florida.
On Monday, Gloria Serge was walking her small dog, Trooper, by a lake in the Spanish Lakes Fairways retirement community in Fort Pierce, Florida, when a large alligator swam to the shore and lunged at the woman and her dog.
Serge tried to pull her dog away from the jaws of the alligator, only to be grabbed by the gator and dragged into the lake.
This tragic event was captured by a wildlife camera set up on the property.
In the video footage, Serge’s neighbor, 76-year-old Carole Thomas is seen running out to the lake, trying to save Serge while calling 911.
“There’s a woman in the lake! The alligator’s got her!” The distressed neighbor told the 911 operator as she tried to hold out a pole for Serge to grab onto.
Sadly, the rescue effort was to no avail and Thomas cried into the phone, “I think she’s gone, oh my God.”
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“There is no way I could have gotten to her sooner,” Thomas said after the fact. “It’s horrible for her family. It’s just horrible, horrible. And her friends, I spoke to a couple of her friends yesterday who are devastated.”
The body of the 85-year-old woman was later recovered from the lake, as was the alligator who the local residents called ‘Henry.’
He was captured and euthanized after the attack.
Serge is the third person in Florida to be killed by an alligator since last July, when an elderly woman fell into a pond near her home in Englewood and was attacked by two alligators.
Over the past 10 years, there have been an average of eight unprovoked, serious alligator bites per year in Florida. Between 1948 and 2021, only 26 unprovoked bite incidents have resulted in human fatalities.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC) website states: “The likelihood of a Florida resident being seriously injured during an unprovoked alligator incident in Florida is roughly only one in 3.1 million.”
