Florida snipers covered several divers who entered a pond infested with alligators, in order to search for a mother and her son who were reported missing, according to authorities.
Nieves Matos, aged 80, and her son, Mario Laza, aged 56, were traveling on the Florida Turnpike in Miami on Friday when they lost control of their vehicle and hurtled into an off-road retention pond.
The witnesses jumped into the water and the police rescue teams followed them, according to WSVN.
However, the policemen realized that the waters were full of alligators, and the snipers surrounded the rescuers to stop any possible attack by the saurians, an extremely dangerous action.
Incident footage shows snipers lying face down with guns pointed into the water as caimans swam around the pond.
Matos was finally located and pulled out of the water; in fact she survived the incident, but not her son who later died at a local hospital.
Relatives of the mother and her son created a GoFundMe page in the wake of the tragic incident to help cover funeral expenses.
The interaction with alligators in Florida
The citizens of Florida are accustomed to “living” with these imposing animals; for example, last 27 April, an alligator of about 11 feet long blocked the circulation of a state highway on the outskirts of the city of Oviedo, in central Florida.
That day, the huge alligator came out of Lake Jesup and crossed the road in the morning, just when there was a lot of traffic, causing fear among motorists, despite the fact that the lizard was not aggressive, as can be seen in some photos released by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office.
Officers from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, together with the Oviedo police, managed to corner the alligator with their vehicles, taking it to the side of the road
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