Posted BY: | NwoReport
A man has lost his arm after being attacked by a 10-foot alligator in a pond behind a bar in Florida.
Jordan Rivera, 23, fell into a pond in the early hours of Sunday after using it to go to the bathroom because the queue inside Banditos bar in Port Charlotte was too long.
He was heard screaming for help after the beast had chomped down on his right arm.
People immediately ran from inside the bar to rescue him, pulling him out of the water and creating a makeshift tourniquet on his severed arm.
From his ICU hospital bed in Fort Myers, Mr. Rivera said: ‘I didn’t lose my life, I lost an arm, it’s not the end of the world.’
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His mother Teresa Lessa said: ‘I call them angels, that were there, that saved his life. The chance of someone being there with a tourniquet, to me, it’s a miracle that he’s here.’
‘The first thing I would do is shake the man’s hand,’ Mr Rivera told NBC 2.
Witness Manny Hidalgo, who came to the rescue, said: ‘He was yelling and swimming toward the shoreline.
‘I ran and dragged him up onto the sand. I was scared to get close to the water because it was dark out.
‘I don’t know if it was a mama gator trying to save her young, or a daddy gator trying to feed his family … but the guy was very lucky,’ he told The Daily Sun.
Mr Rivera, from Englewood, was airlifted to Gulf Coast Hospital in Fort Myers, where his arm could not be saved and was then amputated, said Todd Dunn for Charlotte County Fire and EMS.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) said a nuisance alligator trapper removed the 10.5-foot alligator from the property. It was then euthanized.
