Wine-sipping beautician, 58, killed by alligator after entering pond to pet it
A beautician was savaged to death by an alligator after she waded into a pond to try and pet it. Cynthia Covert, 58, died last Friday after the reptile pounced on her on Kiawah Island near Charleston, South Carolina.
She had gone to a gated community to do a friend’s nails while toting a glass of wine. The beautician was on her way home when she saw the gator in the pond, began taking photos of it and decided to enter the water to try and stroke it. Covert did so despite her pal’s pleas not to, and was trying to touch the creature when it grabbed her.
The woman and her husband had seen the alligator grab a deer a few days previously, and begged Covert not to go near it, only for her to say ‘I don’t look like a deer’, and reach out to pet it. That saw the gator grab the beautician from the waist-deep water with its powerful jaws.
She managed to briefly escape its clutches, and grabbed onto a rope thrown to her by her unnamed client. Covert even joked ‘I guess I won’t do this again,’ moments before the gator attacked again and dragged her to her death. The beautician’s pal called for help, but Covert drowned in the water before sheriff’s deputies were able to shoot the alligator dead in a bid to rescue her.
After blasting the creature through the head, it took 10 minutes for Covert’s body to surface so that they could retrieve it. Her leg had been badly mauled by the gator attack.
On the day of her death, Covert had arrived at the woman’s home with a glass of wine, and spoke of her excitement at an impending visit from her boyfriend, who lived in Tennessee.
The grim details of Covert’s death were released in a preliminary police report. She is the third person to have been killed by a gator in South Carolina since 2016. That year saw the state’s first known fatal gator attack, when a 90 year-old woman wandered out of her nursing home in Charleston and was killed.
In 2018, a 45 year-old woman was mauled to death while walking her dog on Hilton Head Island.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
Source: Read Full Article