SUN-TIMES (Chicago, Illinois) 06 October 04 It's 'see you later, alligator' to man's creeping problem (Mark Brown)
Even after an unannounced visit Tuesday morning from Evanston Police and animal control officers, Gator Guy figured his day had gone pretty well.
"At least he's out of my hands, and I'm not in jail," said a relieved Gator Guy, referring to the alligator he'd raised for the past five years in the basement storage room of an Evanston apartment building.
In his previous anxiety, Gator Guy had been running through scenarios of being arrested and then approached by a violent cellmate on his first night in jail.
"Hey, man. What are you in for?"
"Oh, I had a pet alligator."
"Can you imagine?" said Gator Guy, whose real name is Christopher Deese.
As it stands, there are no plans to prosecute Deese, a 45-year-old security guard who helped his own cause by assisting Evanston officials in removing the 4-foot long, unnamed alligator. Not surprisingly, nobody else wanted the job.
"I guess they've built up a rapport," Evanston Police Cmdr. Joe Bellino said of the relationship between man and gator.
Authorities had shown up on Deese's doorstep after reading my column Tuesday, in which Deese appealed for help in finding the alligator a new home because of the ever-increasing financial burden of feeding it. This wasn't the kind of help Deese had in mind, fearing his pet gator would be killed.
However, it now looks as if everything should work out for the alligator, too, with no immediate threat of getting turned into a leather belt or a Cajun stew.
"Right now, I've got several different [relocation] possibilities," said Evanston Animal Warden Linda Teckler, who supervised the alligator capture -- which basically involved the diminutive Deese wrestling it into a crate.
One possible outcome might even include returning the gator to the sunny climes of Florida, Teckler said.
She's also exploring an option I tried to arrange for the alligator: to be claimed by Serpent Safari, a private zoo in the Gurnee Mills shopping center that specializes in snakes and other reptiles.
Joan Singer, manager at Serpent Safari, told me she's "95 percent certain" she can find a home for the gator at either her facility or with an alligator attraction in the Wisconsin Dells.
At Serpent Safari, Deese's gator would have to share the spotlight with an albino alligator, a 10-foot Nile crocodile, and a 27-foot, 400-pound Burmese python billed as the world's biggest snake living in captivity.
That might not be your cup of tea, but it sounded a lot better for the alligator than the small plastic swimming pool in which it had been living. Plus, this was my first involvement in alligator relocation, so I didn't know anything about more natural habitat options.
Warden Teckler said it was all new to her, too, this being her first gator rescue in 22 years on the job.
Although some readers voiced concern that I had taken advantage of Deese by making his story public, as he had requested, Deese had only one complaint: my failure to include a photo of him with the alligator. It seems some of his friends still didn't believe the story.
That was my fault, and we have remedied that in today's column with the photo by the Sun-Times' Tom Cruze, who deserves extra acknowledgment for going into Deese's basement storage room after dark to shoot the pictures. I had the advantage of sizing up the situation in the daylight, although that didn't keep me from bolting for the door when Deese insisted on removing his 6-foot, red-tailed boa constrictor from its glass cage to give me a closer look.
Deese might want to keep in mind that Serpent Safari's Singer is most commonly called upon to find homes for unwanted snakes and iguanas, often working with local police departments.
"We get a lot of calls from Palatine Police Department," she said. "I don't know why Palatine."
I wouldn't want to speculate.
It's 'see you later, alligator' to man's creeping problem