Gator found in a Pennsylvania creek, safely captured
You may not think of a southwestern Pennsylvania county as being alligator country, but one was in fact found in Beaver County on Wednesday afternoon, spotted by a creek and captured safely.
Viewer video showed the little guy in the wilds of an unnamed Beaver County creek in Freedom, Pennsylvania, which is around 25 miles outside of Pittsburgh.
Someone spotted it and called the Beaver Valley Regional Police.
Tom Mazzant, who was in the area visiting from Florida, said, "I seen four police cars pull up when we pulled up, so we really thought it might be a body or something like that. But then I went down and talked to one policeman. He laughed and said, 'There's a gator down here!'"
Police say they think it's a pet who got away or was ditched by the owner.
Mazzant said police told him the gator was "on the rock bottom. He said he was growling at him. But he's only a two-and-a-half footer — he wasn't really big."
Was Mazzant not impressed by a two-and-a-half-foot-long alligator?
"No, that would be like big mama, down in Florida where we live at, she has babies every year. And they're big," he said.
When asked about the appearance of an alligator in Freedom, resident Jason Shiring said, "I usually go tubing down in the river, so that kind of spooked me out. Like, what if there's one down in the river and it's going to barrel-roll me?"
But now, the little gator has been captured with no harm done to people or gator. The Off the Hook pet shop in Ambridge has taken it in as a guest.
"The key thing about a gator is, he loves chicken," Mazzant said. "I said, 'Just get a piece of chicken and put it in a box,' and he went right in."
The alligator isn't the first to pop up in southwest Pennsylvania in the last year.