Posted on 08/01/2005 10:58:02 AM PDT by nickcarraway
VENICE, La. - An alligator bit a 12-year-old girl while she played with cousins in a forbidden pond near her home in Plaquemines Parish, her family says.
Ashley Brown of Venice is "up and walking around," recuperating from surgery on her hand, said her mother, Loretta Brown.
She lost the tip of one middle finger, bitten off as she tried to push the alligator away from the thigh where it bit her, and doctors grafted skin from the side of her hand to the injured finger, Brown said Friday from her daughter's hospital room at West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero.
Brown said the children had "snuck off" to play in a 4-foot-deep pond behind her uncle's house Wednesday evening, and Ashley thought at first that the underwater attack was just one of her cousins playing.
"She felt like a grip on top of her leg. She tried to get it off with her hands," Brown said.
When Ashley got out of the water, the alligator still had hold of her, Brown said.
"One of my nephews hit it with a 2-by-4 to get it away," she said.
Ashley's grandmother, Aline Perez, said the children ran into her house.
"They were all screaming. Finally, my little granddaughter held up her hand and said, 'Look, Maw Maw, an alligator bit my finger off, '" Perez said.
Perez said she washed the wounds and wrapped Ashley's hand in a towel while an ambulance was called.
Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman Col. Charles Guey said he had little information about the attack, other than a report that an ambulance was called.
Perez said her son and several others later found and shot the alligator, which she described as 7 or 8 feet long. A 7-foot alligator can bite down with a force of 1,500 to 2,000 pounds per square inch, according to a study published in 2003 by scientists at Florida State University.
It's a wonder the child is alive with a gator that big.
I'm sorry this girl got hurt, but thats why you don't swim in ponds in Louisiana!
"A 7-foot alligator can bite down with a force of 1,500 to 2,000 pounds per square inch, according to a study published in 2003 by scientists at Florida State University."
How do they figure out those dang things??
7-8 foot and all she lost is a tip of a finger?
That gator was not hungry nor was it in a bad mood. This girl is as luck as they come, and this family is as stupid as they come for not making sure the kids don't go in that pond. In Florida, we can assume that every lake has gators. Should be no different in LA.
Or even FORBIDDEN ponds...
All the way up to coastal South Carolina.
How many forbidden ponds does La. have?
Don't swim in Texas ponds either. We have alligators in our pond.
WTF?!
Things I don't comprehend:
1. 7-8 foot gator only takes a finger tip from a 12 year old girl?
2. 12 year old girl is able to walk out of the pond with the 7-8 foot gator still clamped down on her thigh?
3. I thought gators shut their eyes underwater?
Really? I never saw a one in Midland! :)
susie
pressure sensors on the end of a piece of lumber that the gator is teased into "chomping" down on.
This is a job for Amos Moses!
I doubt the Gator was that big. Do you think even a grown man could walk out of the pond with a 7 foot gator attached to his upper leg?
We didn't used to have them in our pond either. With every flood they expand their range. Who knows, maybe all the way to Midland someday.
Which - a gator or a pond?
I don't know, but they have at least one..
Yeow!
I used to live in new Orleans. In HS we swam in a river off the Intracoastal Canal on the west bank of New Orleans. We came back the next day and spotted 2 large gators in the same exact spot where we had been swimming. Don't know their size but maybe 8 feet. They looked full-grown to me. I was actually surprised because I didnt think there would be gators in this particular area. Still a stupid thing for me to do but unfortunately kids do stupid things.
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