Killer Gator Caught and Slain in Florida

They got him.

He was a 9-foot-6 beast that took four days to trap and six people to haul in Saturday from the Sunrise canal where he killed a 28-year-old jogger. And inside his stomach, they found the grisly proof that they had the right alligator.

“Hopefully, this will provide some peace to the young woman’s family,” said Dani Moschella, spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “And hopefully this means we have removed a dangerous animal.”

Relatives of the victim, Yovy Suarez Jimenez, could not be reached for comment.

For Kevin Garvey, a trapper and the owner of Nuisance Wildlife Control, finding the gator was personal.

He often patrols that very canal, between Markham County Park and Florida 84, and he knows most of the gators that frequent it. When Jimenez’s dismembered body was found Wednesday by construction workers, he knew he would have to find this new gator before it could kill again.

“I didn’t want anything like this to happen in my territory,” he said. “The pressure’s been on me.”

As he has the last several days, he lobbed his bait into the middle of the canal Friday night: a hunk of pig lung with shark hooks embedded in the meat. That same setup had already caught two gators, whose stomachs revealed an odd diet: raccoon meat, a football and tennis balls.

When Garvey visited his trap about 8:30 a.m. Saturday, he saw it. The male reptile was blind in one eye, which could have made him more aggressive, Garvey said. And the gator thrashed like mad as Garvey and five others yanked him up the embankment.

“He was fighting for his life,” Garvey said.

The gator lost.

Wildlife officials took the reptile to All American Gator Products in Pembroke Pines, where they killed him and performed a necropsy.

They found two severed arms in the gator’s stomach, consistent with Jimenez’s injuries. Officials then cut off the alligator’s head and sent it to the Broward County medical examiner’s office to match the teeth marks to Jimenez’s wounds. The rest of the alligator’s remains were incinerated at the Broward County Humane Society, Moschella said.

Officials say Jimenez, a Florida Atlantic University student out jogging Wednesday, might have stopped to rest near the canal. There, officials surmise, the gator attacked and killed her on land, ripping off both arms and dragging her body into the canal.

An autopsy revealed she died from the alligator bites, not drowning.

Although such attacks have been extremely rare, Moschella warned residents to stay away from alligators, to report aggressive ones and to exercise caution around canals and waterways.