Alligator startles North Carolina church day care worker in most unlikely place

The director of a North Carolina church day care center called the sheriff’s office this week immediately after spotting a most unusual creature on her walk to the church mailbox.

“Am I really looking at an alligator?” the woman recalled thinking of the reptile relaxing in a pipe culvert along Shiloh Church Road near N.C. 73 in Cabarrus County on Monday afternoon.

“It’s not what you expect when you’re going to the mailbox,” she told The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday.

“I really didn’t think they believed me,” the woman said of the reaction when she called the sheriff’s office and said, ‘I’m staring at an alligator.”

“He’s like, ‘uhh, how big is it?’” she said she was asked.

“Three to 4 feet, I can’t really tell, his scales are curled up along his body” she said. “But he is an alligator. I’m staring at it.”

“Well, if anything changes, just call us back,” she said the man replied.

“You are sending somebody, right?” she said she asked. “This isn’t a hoax.”

A half-hour later, Brandon Ayscue of the Cabarrus County sheriff’s animal control division arrived and called N.C. Wildlife Officer Zach Allman for assistance.

“It was real, there was an alligator there,” Allman told the Observer. “It was in the drainage ditch.”

Allman, who covers Cabarrus, Mecklenburg and Union counties, said he’d never responded to an alligator call before. But he learned how to catch them as part of his officer training, he said. Alligators are common on the N.C. coast, but rarely seen inland.

“We captured it with a catch pole,” he said of the 38-inch gator. “You put tape around its snout so it doesn’t bite you. It doesn’t hurt them or anything.”

“It was pretty aggressive,” he said. “But once you catch it with the catch pole, you let it do its thing, but they get wore out pretty quick.”

“Once they start rolling for a little bit — they call it the death roll — it just gets wore out,” he said. “And we turned it over to our Wildlife Management Division to do some tests on it to figure out where it came from,” perhaps Florida, the N.C. coast or somewhere else.

Allman offered what he called “an educated guess” as to where the alligator came from: “It probably was somebody’s pet, and it got too big, and they let it out,” he said.

He said the division can ultimately find which store sold it.

Cabarrus County sheriff’s Lt. Jimmy Torelli said county ordinance bans people from owning such wildlife.

The woman who spotted the alligator said she works at the nearby Shiloh United Methodist Church day care center. She asked not to be identified, although Allman confirmed her name to the Observer, saying it was part of his investigative report.

She told the Observer she stayed behind a pole about five feet from the gator, in case it began to leave so she could alert investigators.

“I was calm until they tried to rescue it,” she said. “It was fighting with them and did not want to be captured. I stayed right in the same spot, hiding behind the pole.”

Renda Sloop Ayscue, the wife of the Cabarrus sheriff’s investigator who responded to the scene and helped Allman corral the gator, drew 128 likes on Facebook when she posted: “My hubby Can add “Gator Catcher” to his list of super HERO powers now!!!”

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission considers alligators “part of the natural fauna in the coastal region of the state and very seldom pose a threat to humans,” according to the commission website.

“In instances where an alligator is seen in an unusual place, such as a pond or ditch, it will more than likely move away on its own within a few hours to a couple of weeks,” according to the commission.

If you see an alligator where they typically don’t belong, call local law enforcement, or the commission’s toll-free helpline at 866-318-2401.