Florida man Jordan Rivera says having his arm ripped off by an alligator “isn’t the end of the world.”
The 23-year-old is now missing an arm after an alligator ripped it off early Sunday morning after he fell into a pond behind a Southwest Florida bar while on a mission to pee after learning the line The bar bath was too long.
Rivera tells NBC-2 Fort Myers that she fell into a pond behind the bar and it was time to go. “I didn’t lose my life, I lost an arm, it’s not the end of the world, you know,” Rivera said. “They grabbed my elbow. So, I don’t have an elbow. I can still move my arm and all that.”
So how come Rivera falls into a puddle behind the bar? Jordan says it’s simple: he went outside to pee and all hell broke loose.
“So I ended up walking towards the waterhole, I didn’t realize how big it was at the time, as I was going there something happened where I tripped or the ground under me just caved in,” Rivera said. “I ended up in the water. And that’s literally the last thing I remember.”
The bar patrons pulled him out of the pond and applied a tourniquet, which Rivera says saved his life.
Now, because this is Florida and there’s always a twist even to stories that already have a twist, there are rumors that Rivera was feeding the alligator when it was attacked.
The one-armed guy says he may not remember much of early Sunday morning behind the Banditos, but he definitely wasn’t feeding the alligator. “That’s not entirely true,” he told NBC-2. “They don’t even serve food at that bar, so it couldn’t even have served the alligator’s food.”
Because it’s my job to investigate those stories, I did some digging on Facebook and it turned out that someone was recording bar patrons coming in to save Jordan from what could have been certain death.
A military veteran named Trent Rozier is being credited as the real hero when he got Rivera to safety.
And this isn’t his first rodeo doing great things for his country. Rozier, according to NBC-2, is an Army Infantry veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who also received a Purple Heart.
“I just tried to do what I had to do,” he told the television station. I’m just a guy who knew what to do. Just in the right place, at the right time, I guess.”
Let this serve as a lesson to all of you who end up next to a reflecting pool after a night in a bar. You better have a backup plan like taking Trent Rozier, or someone with similar training, with you to the bar to save your life.
Have a plan.
