Woman killed after trying to pet alligator. File in the stranger-than-fiction department:
- The woman — who was, I emphasize, from South Carolina — was visiting a gated community to do a homeowner’s nails [note: social distance much?].
- She saw the alligator, so naturally she went outside to pet it.
- Nearby watchers shouted at her to get away because they’d seen the alligator take a deer a few days earlier.
- “I don’t look like a deer” the woman said.
- The alligator chomped, but at first she got away.
- “After briefly getting away from the alligator Friday, the woman stood in waist deep water in the Kiawah Island pond and said ‘I guess I wont do this again,’”
- But it was too late….
This is only the third known alligator-caused fatality in South Carolina’s modern history, so how could the woman be expected to know that petting an alligator was a bad idea?