Police in St. Petersburg, Florida, have identified the remains of a 16-year-old boy retrieved from Lake Maggiore in the jaws of an alligator on the Fourth of July — the second instance of human remains being eaten by one of these reptiles in the Sunshine State in little more than a week.
The boy, Jarvis Deliford, was reported missing on June 29, but friends and relatives do not know why he was near the lake. Police acknowledged that his body had significant evidence of “alligator involvement” but did not yet have a ruling on his cause of death from the medical examiner.
Deliford was discovered by a fisherman on the early morning of Independence Day when he noticed two alligators fighting over something large in the lake. He contacted authorities when he realized it was a human body. Deliford’s family was skeptical that he would voluntarily be near a lake because he did not know how to swim.
Police spokeswoman Yolanda Fernandez said of the discovery, “It would have to be a medical examiner determination to see if the gators came before or after. At this time we can’t say it’s an alligator attack, but they were around the body and that made it more difficult getting to it.” Two alligators were later removed from the lake to be examined for more human remains.
The recovery of Deliford’s body comes just over a week after police found 45-year-old Michael Ford’s body floating in a Polk County canal, about 60 miles east of St. Petersburg, in Mosaic Park. Investigators, responding to a 911 call from a park employee on June 27, recovered the body of a man partially eaten by alligators and later determined that the man was Ford, who had been missing since June 23.
A medical examiner tentatively ruled the cause of Ford’s death to be an drowning, pending results of a toxicology screening. Whether or not Ford drowned as a result of the attack or if the alligator found him already dead has yet to be determined.
Officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission trapped and killed a large alligator in the Mosaic Park canal, with a subsequent examination proving the animal had partially digested a human hand and foot, later determined to be Ford’s.
