An unidentified woman has died from an apparent alligator attack on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina Monday morning, according to local authorities.
If confirmed, it would be the first fatal alligator attack in decades in South Carolina, local officials told ABC News.
Witnesses saw the woman waking a dog near a lagoon at Sea Pines Plantation, a gated community on Hilton Head, when she was attacked by an alligator and pulled underwater, the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office said.
“They were able to get her out of the water and she was still alive, but she died at the scene,” according to David Lucas of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.
An autopsy will determine the cause of the woman’s death, the sheriff’s office said.
Her dog didn’t appear to be hurt, the sheriff’s office added.
Authorities are now searching for the gator, reported to be about 8 feet long, the sheriff’s office said.
There has only been one reported death related to an alligator in the past 42 years in South Carolina, and it remains a mystery whether alligators actually caused that death, Lucas said.
“It was in 2016,” he said. “A lady wandered off from a nursing home and she was found [deceased] in a pond, bitten pretty badly. But we don’t know — and I don’t think we’ll ever be able to determine because there were no witnesses — whether she fell in and was then bitten, or whether she was attacked and then dragged into the pond.”
