Employees at a Texas shopping centre likely got quite the scare over the weekend thanks to an alligator named Godzilla.
The gator, which weighs 362 kilograms (800 pounds), was spotted wandering outside the Houston-area centre on Saturday by people arriving for work, according to The Associated Press.
Alligator trapper Christy Kroboth received a call from police around 6:20 a.m. about the gator in the the Home Depot parking lot at the First Colony Commons strip mall, she told the Houston Chronicle.
Kroboth, who also works at a dental office, thought capturing the reptile โ first reported to be two metres long (6.5 feet) โ would be an easy job.
Turns out, police underestimated Godzillaโs size.
Godzilla the 362-kilogram alligator in Sugar Land, Texas.
She arrived to find a nearly four-metre-long (13-foot) creature that took three hours to subdue, muzzle and load into a truck, even with the help of several police officers.
Kroboth and her team actually had to use a forklift from Home Depot to move the colossal animal.
"This is the first time a forklift had to be used to assist in the safe removal of the alligator. Most times we are able to use a team of people to help pick the animal up to load him," she told The Huffington Post in an email.
Kroboth believes the gator may have come from a nearby creek, explaining that his partial blindness may have contributed to him getting lost, according to the Chronicle.
The animal was taken to a gator reserve on Monday.
Kroboth told HuffPost the animal was the biggest catch of her career.
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