AVE MARIA, Fla. — A Southwest Florida woman thought a burglar was breaking into her home. It was much more terrifying -- two angry alligators were brawling outside in a battle that spilled onto her screened-in porch.
Kayla Burress told WINK that she heard a noise outside of her home in Ave Maria that was getting louder by the minute. When she looked outside, the two large reptiles were fighting violently.
The alligators slammed into the porch’s screen, ripping through it and leaving shredded mesh and twisted metal in their wake, the television station reported.
“I thought somebody was breaking in because I never thought that the gators were going to enter my porch,” Burress told WINK. “It definitely looked like they were fighting over territory or something.
“It wasn’t like a mating ritual that I had seen, because there was blood and it had it some hind quarters, like in its jaws through the door.”
A Southwest Florida woman says she's lucky after two alligators violently fighting crashed into her lanai.https://t.co/eXSiYX2Onm
— WINK News (@winknews) May 5, 2026
Ave Maria is located 36 miles northeast of Naples in Collier County, close to the Everglades. And while gators in the area are not rare, a fight happening so close to home was frightening to Burress.
“It was scary,” Burress told WINK. “And I just warned everybody else in the neighborhood, like, watch your kids. Watch the dogs. Because it was, it was fast and they were powerful.”
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