Woman’s arm found inside alligator who snatched her
One moment she was there, the next she had vanished from the pond’s edge. Only her two dogs remained.
A 12-foot-6-inch long alligator attacked the woman from the bank as she walked her dogs Friday, officials said.
Although no one witnessed the attack, the proof — one of the woman’s arms — was found inside the reptile.
Authorities identified the woman as 47-year-old Shizuka Matsuki, of Plantation.
“Her dogs won’t leave the pond,” Davie Police Maj. Dale Engle said Friday when the search began. “One of her dogs got bit by the gator.”
A witness who had seen a woman walking her pets near the water in Silver Lakes Rotary Nature Park on Friday morning later noticed the dogs barking near the water’s edge.
The woman was nowhere to be seen.
After a daylong search, at around 4:45 p.m. a truck towing a Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission boat left the park in the 5600 block of Southwest 52nd Street followed by vehicles from the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office and Davie police.
Officers will remain at the park until Matsuki’s body is found, and the search continued overnight, Officer Ronald Washington, a spokesman for the wildlife commission, said at the scene.
Davie police said there would be an airboat in the lake throughout the night, and that the area is closed to the public until further notice.
Anthony Anderson, who lives across the street from Matsuki’s Plantation Isles home, said Matsuki walks her dogs every morning. When she left with her two pooches Friday morning, she waved at another neighbor as she pulled away, he said.
Anderson said he was shocked by the news of his neighbor’s death. “They’re really nice people,” he said.
Davie resident Trina Gonzalez recalled visiting the park a year ago and seeing a large gator swim up to the bank after her son threw bread in the water to feed the fish.
“That gator was there in a heartbeat,” she said. “We never went back again.”
Park lore, according to Gonzalez, was that the large gator was treated by other visitors as a mascot of sorts. They sabotaged traps set to catch it, she said.
Davie assistant parks director Jeff Polhman said three trappers had been hired in the past 18 to 24 months to try and capture the gator, but that he had not heard of any sabotaged traps or interference in the effort.
The gator eluded the traps and there hadn’t been a sighting in the last month, Polhman said. It’s impossible to know whether the reptile that visitors have previously reported to authorities figured into Friday’s investigation, he said. The wildlife commission is leading the investigation.
“This tragedy is heartbreaking for everyone involved, and our sincere condolences go out to the family and friends of the victim at this time,” agency spokesman Rob Klepper said in an email.
Alligators live in all of Florida’s 67 counties, and as development encroaches upon wetlands and waterfronts, people can expect to encounter the reptiles, the wildlife commission says on its website.
The state has a nuisance hotline — 866-392-4286 — to report concerns about gators.
During the past decade, the agency has received about 16,000 gator-related complaints each year.
Alligators make national news when they show up in homeowners’ swimming pools or at their front doors. Nuisance gators taken by trappers are usually destroyed.
Though gator encounters are fairly common in Florida, the state averages only “about five unprovoked bites per year,” the wildlife commission said. Since 1948, it said, there have been 300 incidents when alligators have bitten people; 22 have died.
The state said that among local deaths by alligators was a 36-year-old man who died while swimming across a pond in November 2007 in west Miami. An alligator “seized and drowned” him in the water at the Miccosukee Indian reservation.
Witnesses reported the man disappeared while trying to elude police. Divers found his body at the bottom of the pond, and two gators — one 9-foot-4 in length, the other 7-foot-6 — were removed from the pond.
In Broward County in May 2006, a 28-year-old woman was killed by an alligator at the North New River Canal in Sunrise. A 9-foot-6 alligator was caught and destroyed, according to the state.