US3 min(s) read
Published 12:48 25 Sep 2023 GMT
A troubling twist has emerged after a woman's lifeless body was found after a suspected alligator attack.
As previously reported, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office revealed that 41-year-old Sabrina Peckham was the victim of an attack involving a male alligator measuring nearly 14 feet in length.
The woman was dragged by the beast in a canal along a residential street in Largo - a small community just four miles south of Clearwater - after witnesses reported that the predator had a corpse in its mouth.
Police officers shared in a statement that with the help of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), the animal was "humanely killed".
Footage taken at the scene shows a huge alligator sprawled by the road and surrounded by police.
According to The New York Post, court records showed that Peckham, who was reportedly homeless, was caught by authorities around 6:30AM on July 14 for trespassing on a county wetland - just half a mile from where she was later found dead.
It has been reported that Peckman overlooked signs warning against unlawful entry and was released on September 8 after pleading no contest to the misdemeanor. She was ordered to pay $500.
It is not clear where the woman - who has had several charges against her for trespassing - went in the two weeks before she was discovered dead in the waterway.
Her deceased body was found by a local witness named Jamarcus Bullard who told US media that he was walking to a job interview when he spotted the vicious animal with what initially looked like a mannequin in its mouth.
"I noticed it had a body in its mouth - like a lower torso - so once I saw that I ran straight to the fire department," he said, as cited by BBC News. "It was my first time seeing a gator in real life so I was like it's pretty cool, but once I saw what it had I was like 'Is that like a mannequin?'"
"It was pale and white," he continued, telling another publication that the animal was "just clamped onto it, and swam backward to the bottom of the canal... I just couldn't believe it was real".
Bullard also explained to WFLA that he hurled a rock at the giant beast when he saw it holding onto the lower part of the victim’s torso in its jaws. The gator then yanked the body underwater.
Peckham's daughter, Breauna Dorris, wrote in a heartbreaking Facebook post that her mother was "part of the homeless population" and lived near the body of water
Her family has now created a GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral costs. As of this writing, more than $6,455 had been raised.
The cause and circumstances of Peckham’s death have not yet been confirmed.
An autopsy is expected to be carried out, and an investigation remains underway.
