A man was killed on Friday after being dragged into a retention pond by an alligator near Myrtle Beach, S.C., the first such deadly attack in the state since 2020, the authorities said.
Fatal alligator attacks are rare in the United States, typically occurring about once a year, but the latest was the second in less than a month. The body of a man who had been retrieving Frisbees from a lake in Largo, Fla., which serves as a habitat for alligators, was found on May 31.
In Friday’s killing, the authorities responded around 11:45 a.m. to a water-rescue call, the Horry County Police Department said in a statement. Rescuers “determined that an alligator took hold of a neighbor who was near the edge of a retention pond and retreated” into it, the department said in a statement.
A biologist with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and an alligator-removal contractor determined that the animal needed to be “humanely euthanized on site,” the police said.
Fatal alligator attacks are rare in the United States, typically occurring about once a year, but the latest was the second in less than a month. The body of a man who had been retrieving Frisbees from a lake in Largo, Fla., which serves as a habitat for alligators, was found on May 31.