Deputies in South Carolina shot and killed an alligator that fatally attacked a woman on Friday, authorities said.
The officers were called to a pond on Kiawah Island around 5 p.m. and saw the animal attack, the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office said. The woman was already dead.
A sheriff’s deputy shot and killed the alligator and then retrieved its carcass to help in the ongoing investigation.
The woman’s identity has not been released.
Authorities did not say if they knew what the woman or the alligator were doing before the attack.
This is the third fatal alligator attack in South Carolina in the past four years. A 90-year-old woman walked out of a Charleston nursing home in 2016 and was killed, while a 45-year-old woman walking her dog was fatally attacked on Hilton Head Island in August 2018.
Before those attacks, South Carolina had never recorded a person killed by an alligator.