It happened while 4-year-old Brandaly Grande was playing with her brother AJ and her babysitter near the creek behind their home.
The family from League City, Texas, had a close encounter with an enormous reptile.
Dad Andrew Grande Sr. had spotted the scaly head of a giant alligator in Clear Creek, and it was headed straight toward Brandaly—or Bambi as they call her.
“I happened to be standing kinda where we are right now picking something up and I happened to look back and not ten yards from her was a huge alligator kinda coming straight in her distance right toward her,” the dad explained.
Grande Sr. then took quick action.
He ran for Brandaly and the babysitter, Robin Randolph, and whisked them to safety before the gator could contemplate making them its next meal.
Afterward, Robin the babysitter told the Houston news outlet that the gator “was making a bee-line for us.”
“Andrew had knocked me into the gate. Picked up Bambi and threw her over the fence,” she added.
Once everyone was safely inside the fence, Andrew called the Game Warden to the scene to help relocate the giant alligator. They later brought in an alligator hunter to assist the effort. Meanwhile, the gator remained in the creek, Andrew said, occasionally surfacing to check on its potential prey.
“Whether he was gonna do anything, I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to take that chance,” he added. He says gator sightings are not unheard of in League City, though they aren’t usually 12 feet long.
Eventually, the alligator hunter showed up and quickly looped a rope around the huge reptile’s head. But it took three hours to lift the 517-pound (approx. 234-kilogram) giant onto the bulkhead using plywood sheets. Then they used tape to secure its massive jaws for handling during the journey. It measured a staggering 11 feet, 7 inches in length.
Grande Sr. bore no hard feelings toward the reptile. What’s important was that everyone was safe—including the alligator. He was brought to Gator Country in Beaumont, Texas, a “good place” for him, the dad said, and they would be “happy to have” him there.
“And we look forward to go visit him one day,” he added.
