Florida Man Survives Gator Attack After Neighbors Drive Over the Beast With SUV

February 17, 2025 journo

Walt Rudder (right) poses with alligator whose attack he foiled – By Rick Fingeret

A pair of Florida residents are set to enjoy a show by former Tonight Show host Jay Leno as a deserved reward for snatching their neighbor from the jaws of death.

Or, perhaps it should read the jaws leased by death, because at the time they belonged to a massive American alligator that ran down Rick Fingeret walking his dogs down their Naples street.

Occurring after dark on Friday, April 19th of last year, Fingeret was passing a pond in which he had seen alligators lounging every so often, when he felt a tug on the leashes of his two dogs. They might have been Labradors, and fit for all kinds of emergency situations when trained, but this was an 11-foot-long gator, sprinting with its mouth open towards them at probably close to 10 miles per hour.

Speaking with the Naples Daily News, Fingeret recounts a nightmarish scenario with stunning clarity. He starts by saying he began to back away fast.

“I tripped in all the frenzy,” Fingeret remembered. “And the minute I fell—(he claps his hands together to simulate the gator’s jaws closing)… He got me.”

Apparently, the pair lay on the grass for several moments, the gator unsure of what to do next.

“Every so often, you’d feel a lurch,” Fingeret says. “A tug. He wanted to move me, but he couldn’t. I was bigger than he had anticipated. I wanted it to know that I was there. I had a lot of fight left in me. And I was very conscious of not passing out. Because the minute that would happen, I would be done.”

He started hammering at the beast’s scaley armor, poking its eyes, and trying to pry open its jaws without any luck.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the strangest part of the story came in the next part which Fingeret narrated—his dogs lay at his side, silent, and probably frozen in terror. Somehow he managed to keep a hold of their leashes through the entire ordeal.

Next, neighbors Walt Rudder and Paula Keegan were driving by when they saw and heard Fingeret on his side, next to his dogs, screaming for help. They thought he had fallen and broken something, but after the dogs moved a little, they saw that unmistakable shape unchanged for 300 million years.

Mr. Rudder ran over and described a “supernatural” level of calm from which Fingeret instructed his neighbor to gather up his dogs and put them in the car—and then run the lizard over with it.

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Throwing his heavy Lincoln into drive, Rudder needed just one pass over the alligator’s midsection, who, terrifyingly, held up well and ran back down to the pond. It was over.

Walt Rudder and Paula Keegan meeting Jay Leno – credit, provided by Walt Rudder

They used a t-shirt and dog leash to stop the bleeding, and the Sheriff’s Department, which Rudder had called, arrived after.

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The two neighbors admit to being “bonded for life” after the experience, and Fingeret’s nomination of Rudder and Keegan for the Naples Daily News contest saw them win tickets to Jay Leno’s show at the Hertz arena two weeks ago.

The two men would later watch as the assailant was captured by animal authorities which, being Florida, specializes in problem gators. Incredibly, the animal neither broke Fingeret’s bones, nor tore any ligaments, nor punctured the femoral artery.

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