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Tuesday, January 13, 6:00 p.m.
By Rob Stewart
Frozen Alligator Found
The cold conditions are blamed for an unusual find in the Poconos. A man found a frozen alligator, four feet one and a half inches long, in Monroe County.
"I thought it was rubber. I belong to the firehouse. All the guys said down there that it is fake. I said, no it is not! It is the real McCoy," said Peter Holthausen.
He's the guy who found the alligator. As a maintenance worker for the Bethlehem Water Authority , Holthausen was walking around the Wild Creek Reservoir. He walks the area streams everyday.
"I said to the boss jokingly, 'hey, I'm not going to walk the streams anymore," laughed Holthausen.
Never in his wildest dreams did he think he'd stumble upon that kind of find. "I said, I got an alligator here. It is dead. And they were like, 'what did you say?' I said 'I got an alligator', and there it was," recalled Holthausen.
When he found the gator, it was half in the water and half out. Completely frozen, but buried from about the waist down. "I stepped back a couple of minutes, I took in the moment," he said.
Holthausen says the gator was probably a pet, too big to care for and that someone probably let it loose in the wild. Even though it froze to death, it is still scary.
Abandoning a pet in the wild is no laughing matter. Letting an alligator go in the wild is not only cruel, it's illegal, with a minimum fine of 0.
http://www.wnep.com/Global/story.asp?S=1599463&nav=5ka4KAph