Most Floridians always know that alligators can be everywhere and anywhere.
So they shouldn’t be surprised at the report that a nine-foot alligator chased 15-year-old Jordan Broderick, forcing her to climb up a tree, in Florida’s Ocala National Forest on June 29, according to the Washington Post.
The girl and her family had come to enjoy the creek in the sweltering Florida heat.
But alligators came, as they have done for millions of years, to breed.
One gator in particular cut a path toward the girl floating on a raft, but she thought fast, scurrying up a tree branch hanging over the water.
“My daughter is stuck in a fricking tree and there are gators surrounding her. We can’t get her out. She’s just 15,” Jordan Broderick’s mother told a dispatcher in a frantic 911 call.
“Oh my God. Please hurry! Please hurry!” the mother pleaded near Astor, about 55 miles north of Orlando, on the recording provided to The Post by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.
But a marine unit was about 20 minutes away, the dispatcher told the mother.
And sure enough, a deputy arrived, armed with an AR-15, dispatching the gator with a shot to the head.