23-year-old Florida resident Jordan Rivera was relieving himself behind a bar early last Sunday when he fell into a pond where a hungry alligator was waiting.
Rivera lost his right arm in the altercation, which he reportedly doesn’t remember.
“So I ended up walking over to the water hole, I didn’t realize how big it was at the time, as I was going over there something happened where I either tripped or the ground below me just went down,” Rivera told NBC2 in an interview from his bed in the ICU.
“I ended up in the water. And that’s literally the last thing I remember”
Rivera was reportedly rescued by locals, who pulled him from the water and treated him with a tourniquet they had handy.
Alligator in the Everglades National Park (credit: BEN G. FRANK)How did Rivera react to losing his arm?
Rivera was unperturbed by the incident, as he described waking up in the hospital to the media.
“I looked over and I saw my arm the way it was and I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
“I didn’t lose my life, I lost an arm, it’s not the end of the world,” Rivera said. “Those gators, I didn’t truly understand them until I woke up in the hospital and, ‘Oh, gator got your arm.”
“They got my elbow. So, I don’t have an elbow,” he added. “I can still move my arm around and whatnot.”
Rivera took the opportunity to confront local rumours that he had been feeding the alligator, an accusation he denied.
“That is completely not true,” he said. “They don’t even serve food at that bar, so I couldn’t have even served the gator food.”
A spokesman for Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservative Commission told NBC2 that the 3.175-meter alligator had been euthanized.
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