‘I guess I won’t do this again,’ says manicurist just moments before alligator kills her

A 58-year-old manicurist drowned after she was attacked by an alligator on Kiawah Island, in South Carolina in the US, on 1 May.

Cynthia Covert had just finished a manicure for a client, Barbara Howell, who lives on an estate on the island, when she spotted the alligator in the nearby pond, Mail Online reports. She started taking pictures of it from Barbara’s porch, where she’d done the manicure, but moved increasingly closer to the animal.

At one point, Barbara and her husband suddenly noticed Cynthia was too close to the animal, and called at her to be careful as they’d seen it kill a deer just a few days before. “I don’t look like a deer,” Cynthia called back.

The next moment, the alligator grabbed her by the leg and started pulling her into the water. Barbara and other bystanders rushed to help, at one point throwing her a rope to pull her out. Cynthia grabbed onto the rope and calmly said

An alligator typically drowns its prey using something known as a “death roll” – and that’s how Cynthia was killed. When rescuers arrived, there was no sign of Cynthia’s body. The animal surfaced about 15 minutes later on the other side of the pond, still holding Cynthia’s body by the leg. It disappeared again, and when it resurfaced a second time, police shot and killed the animal to retrieve the body.

Barbara later claimed that Cynthia had been acting strange before the incident and was a lot more talkative than usual, according to NBC News.

Authorities who retrieved her body say her leg had been severely damaged. An autopsy later confirmed cause of death as drowning.

This was the third alligator fatality reported in South Carolina in the past four years.

Source: Mail Online, NBC News, ABCnews4.com

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