The woman found in a gator’s mouth was believed to be in her 60s (Picture: ABC13)
A missing woman’s body was found in the mouth of an alligator still chewing on her.
Patrol officers found ‘the remains of a woman in the jaws of an alligator’ in the Horsepen Bayou around 8.40am on Tuesday while searching the area for a female reported missing, according to Houston Police Department (HPD) Homicide Division Sergeants R Watson and M Burrow.
A sergeant ‘fatally shot the alligator to prevent it from doing more damage to the remains’, stated the officials on Wednesday.
Dive team members recovered the woman’s body and the gator from the bayou on the 2700 block of Coastal Oak Drive, west of El Dorado Boulevard, in the Clear Lake neighborhood.
Fatal alligator attacks in Texas are rare (Picture: Getty Images)
The woman was believed to be in her 60s. She was not immediately identified.
Her cause and manner of death are pending an autopsy by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
It was not clear if the woman was killed by the reptile or if the animal found her dead and was scavenging on her corpse.
A dive team recovered the woman’s remains from the bayou in Houston, Texas (Picture: ABC13)
Texas Parks and Wildlife Law Enforcement Division spokesperson Maggie Berger told KTRK: ‘HPD is currently investigating the incident and will be the lead agency moving forward. Our thoughts are with the woman’s family during this time.’
Angela Derous, who was fishing in the bayou on Tuesday night, said she has seen eight to 10-foot baby gators living there.
‘I know which banks to stay away from and where they like to lay in the sun,’ she told the TV station. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard of that happening down here. It’s a little scary.’
A sergeant shot the alligator dead to prevent further damage to the woman’s body (Picture: Getty Images)
Anyone with information on the incident is asked to contact the police department’s homicide division.
Fatal gator attacks are not common in Texas, with the last one happening in Orange in 2015 when a 28-year-old man was swimming in Adams Bayou. The last fatal attack before that occurred more than 90 years ago.
The unidentified woman’s death comes more than a year after a two-year-old boy was found dead in a gator’s mouth. His father was accused of throwing him into a lake in St Petersburg, Florida. A medical examiner determined that the toddler died from drowning.
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