Mind The Waters Edge

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 Yovy Suarez 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 am 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, after he 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 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.