Christina Saenz spotted the alligator on the side of her house, way too close for comfort.
"I had to double take, reverse and look again," she said. "I couldn't believe what I saw."
Saenz found alligator in her yard, just feet from her front door, nestled along the side of the house.
She recalled, "I was like, 'What the heck? What do I do? Who do I call?'"
She called 911. A deputy and Texas Parks and Wildlife responded. Game warden Barry Eversole estimates the gator was at least eight feet long.
He said, "The size of an alligator like that, I'm by myself, you're not going to over power him."
Eversole says it became a safety issue as he approached the gator, then shot and killed it.
"We try to remove as many as we can alive," Eversole said. "But there's a point where you've got to take safety into concern and you've got to do what you need to do You can't move all of them alive."
Eversole says using tranquilizers on a reptile this size is an inexact science that will often lead to its death. He tells us the gator likely lived in one of the manmade ponds in the neighborhood.
Saenz, who worried for her two children and dog, is just glad it's off her doorstep.
"It's bittersweet," she said. "I thought they would probably relocate it to its natural habitat or a different place. But what do you do? He's only one guy and that thing was pretty big."
The alligator will not be wasted. It has already been turned in for processing.
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