For reasons not yet fully understood, a naked 45-year-old man who had been smoking crack wandered into a swampy area near Lakeland at 4 AM last evening. ...His name is A____.
He was grabbed by a 12 foot, 500-pound alligator. Deputies wrestled him away from the gator, but not before the gator took the last grip on his buttocks after eating most of his left arm...The gator has since been captured and euthanized, in accordance with the State of Florida policy.
To followup on this story, the police found A____'s pickup truck late at night over a year later near a place called Saddle Creek Park. A license check revealed that the truck belonged to Adrian, with whom they were familiar, and who they found swimming (naked again) 50 feet offshore in an area well populated with alligator eyes.
A____ was held briefly at a mental health facility as a possible danger to himself and charged with trespassing, exposure of sexual organs and creating a nuisance. He failed to appear in court as scheduled after release on a $1,500 bond.
A month later, police found an unidentified human body in the jaws of a gator at Saddle Creek Park, leading them to do a quick wellness check on A____.
A___ has a MySpace account. He says if you want to talk about gators, he says that you have to pay him. I'm tempted to open an account so I can just be his friend.
There are two excellent writers who formerly had crime beats on major Florida newspapers and who recognized that the absurd happenings in this State created a rich opportunity for a novelist to write humorous novels about murder, alligators, and roadkill.
One is Tim Dorsey, formerly of the Tampa Tribune and the other is Carl Hiaasen of the Miami Herald. Each of these former reporters has a half-dozen excellent novels to their credit, all based in a Florida setting and chock-full of dark absurdities loosely based on real Florida life.
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