GATOR HATER
Severed reptile legs discovered along a Williamsburg street, baffling locals
WHO the Butcher of Williamsburg?
Someone has dumped alligator legs along N. 10th St., with one found between two rocks outside a construction site, another protruding from a street grate and a third on the seat of a junked car.
The reptilian mystery has the neighborhood baffled.
“Maybe he ate the rest of it and didn’t like the leg,” said Ricardo Rodrigo, 67, a manager at a building across the street from where one of the three legs was discovered.
There’s no doubt that the evisceration is the work of a human — not the remains of a real live Beast of Brooklyn on the prowl.
“This is certainly a mutilation situation, and it’s a sick individual who would do that,” said “Jungle Bob” Smith, owner of Jungle Bob’s Reptile World in Centereach, L.I. “Down South, people eat gator, they eat the tail part and cut it up to get the meat there.
“But,” he added, “they’re not common in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, that’s the part that befuddles me.”
Smith said people who own the reptiles — which are illegal without a permit — sometimes abandon them once the animals get too large for their enclosures.
Few New Yorkers, after all, can house a 10-foot beast weighing 1,000 pounds.
For now, neighbors are just trying to understand the butchering in their midst.
“I don’t know whether to be disgusted or surprised,” said Hanna Adames, 23. “I think I would have been less surprised if it was a (human) finger.”
Rodrigo chucked the limb he spotted behind a gate so it would not scare anyone walking by. He remarked that it was not like the old days in Williamsburg, of course.
“Twenty years ago, there used to be dead bodies all along the water,” he said. “So this is nothing.”