A deputy hauled an alligator out of a family’s pool — and even buckled it up in the back seat of his patrol car — in a wild video that one fan said showed Florida grit “at its finest.”
Officer Nathan Richardson with the St. Johns County Sheriff’ ‘s Office wasted no time wrangling the roughly 4-foot-long gator out of the swimming pool in St. Augustine while the worried homeowner watched on.
Richardson used the pool’s skimmer to first drag the young gator to the pool’s deck before grabbing it by its neck as it writhed on the pavement.
“I gotcha, you’re fine. I know, you’re super mad,” the deputy told the alligator as he brought it under control.
The deputy used his free hand to hold onto the alligator’s tail before picking it up. The gator, having likely realized resistance would be futile, remained relatively still during the process.
The homeowner quickly concluded that Richardson must have been raised locally to have such proficiency with subduing the predator.
“Florida grown at its finest!” the man said on the video as Richardson headed to his patrol car with the gator.
Richardson, who was born and raised in Jacksonville, opened the side door, holding onto the gator’s tail as if it were a dog’s leash. The alligator flailed once, snapping its neck upward as it fought against the cop’s sleeve around its snout before giving up.
Richardson then placed the young gator in the backseat of his patrol car and tucked its tail inside before realizing he could easily secure the reptile better.
“You know what, let me buckle you in,” he said.
Richardson drove the strapped-in alligator to a nearby pond away from the neighborhood and freed it, according to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office
“I put everyone in a seat belt in my back seat so I felt like I should buckle the gator up too,” Richardson told the Raleigh News & Observer in an email.
By comparison, in New York City, where cops handle many of the most gruesome crimes around, some can’t seem to tackle alligators.
In June, a onetime NYPD officer who relocated to Florida was caught “squealing” as his partner tried to hand off a young alligator they’d captured locally.
“You have big teeth. I have tiny fingers,” the officer told the small predator.
Alligators are found in all of Florida’s 67 counties, with an estimated population of 1.3 million, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.