Worse than cockroaches: Finding an 8-foot gator on your kitchen floor

April 22, 2008

EAST LAKE -- Around 10:30 p.m. Monday, Sandra Frosti heard an intruder bumping around in her kitchen.

Turns out, the noise was made by an 8-foot, 8-inch alligator that had crawled into the 69-year-old's kitchen in Eastlake Woodlands.

The female alligator apparently pushed through a screened panel on the back porch, shouldered its way past a potted ficus tree, then got inside the house through an open rear sliding glass door. Once inside, it crawled through the living room, down the hall and into the kitchen.

When Frosti looked into the kitchen, she saw the beast's head. She called 911 and left the house. Click here for audio of the 911 call.

"What's going on?" asked a dispatcher.

"There's an alligator in my kitchen!" Frosti said.

"How long do you think the alligator is ma'am?"

"It's huge!" Frosti said. "... I only saw the first half of it, and that had to be at least 3 feet. ... Because it was behind the freezer, and I just disappeared."

"Are you sure it couldn't be like, a, uh, iguana or a really large..."

"Oh, no, no, no, no!" Frosti said.

"All right," the dispatcher told her, "we'll get deputies out that way."

Pinellas deputies called a trapper who removed it about 1:30 a.m. During the capture, the gator was slightly injured when a plate was knocked to the ground and cut the reptile. No other injuries were reported.

"The house was a mess," Frosti said. "It did a good amount of damage in the kitchen."

This morning, there was still dirt and blood on the kitchen floor, blood spattered on the wall and a claw mark on the hallway wall.

Frosti said she didn't know when the gator got in or where it might have wandered before she noticed it.

"It might have been in the bedroom for all I know," she said.

The gator "looked awfully well-fed," she said, adding that authorities told her they thought it was "wanted to check out the cat."

This morning, Frosti said she had no hard feelings and even worried that the alligator would be destroyed because of her size. Mostly, she found the whole thing amusing.

"I can't wait to tell my grandkids," she said, "because they probably won't believe me."