A Florida MMA fighter and Marine veteran captured a ten-foot long alligator in the parking lot of an elementary school.
When a giant alligator was spotted perilously close to a Jacksonville elementary school last month, law enforcement authorities called in Mike Dragich, a licensed alligator trapper.
“We get there. I walked through the gate. And boom. There it was just ready to go right there in the parking lot, and we just had to get the job done,” he told Fox 35 Orlando.
A crowd of around 200 people were gathered around the school to witness the spectacle.
In the video, Dragich initially approached the gator head on with a pole catch, but quickly changed tactics.
The crowd could be heard screaming as he tried to grab the beast’s tail from behind, while police and fire crews observed.
At one point, Dragich was able to get a hold of the alligator’s tail and pull it back, but it got away.
Eventually he successfully snagged it around the neck with the pole catch, but had to endure the gator’s full body barrel rolls until it tired out.
A first responder took control of the pole and Dragich leapt on the gator’s shoulders to pin it down.
In the next scene, he can be seen holding the animals jaws closed while a firefighter tapped it’s mouth shut, as several others sat on the gator’s backside.
Dragich said the entire experience made him feel like Batman.
“I was there, these people were scared to death,” he said in an interview with News4JAX.
“I felt like Batman, for real, you know, I show up. I walk out. There are a lot of comments saying I look like (WWE wrestler) Stone Cold walking up to this alligator.”
Dragich told reporters while it looked like he was playing with the animal, while they were wrestling, it was actually a tactic to subdue the gator.
“To me it’s playing. I love doing it, there’s nothing that gets the juices flowing and the adrenaline flowing quite like messing with a big alligator,” he quipped.
“But what I was doing was getting him tired. You’ve got to get these animals tired, or they can really hurt you.”
Dragich is already a bona fide social media sensation from posting videos of himself wrestling gators on his “Blue Collar Brawler” Instagram page.
He doesn’t post the videos for vanity, rather to get exposure for his veteran’s organization “Project Savior Outdoors,” which has a “mission to fight PTSD and veteran suicide through connecting with the outdoors.”
“Our goal is to take veterans, first responders, and people out there that are struggling with mental illness and get them the help that they need,” Dragich explained.
Though he constantly posts his gator wrestling, the veteran is quick to caution viewers about engaging in similar acts.
“I always tell people, be very careful and don’t do what I’m doing on social media,” he stated.
“But, I can promise you, that the animals are respected and they are dealt with in a professional manner each and every time, regardless of what it may look like on social media.”
As for his most viral catch, the gator had to be put down because of its size and aggression level.
Dragich has since harvested the meat and hopes to have a community cookout with the spectators who watched him wrestle it at the school.
