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Contributed photo/Saltville Police Chief Steve Surber said wildlife officials can conduct tests on an alligator killed in Saltville Friday to determine where it came from.

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Alligator on Saltville road shocks driver, police

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

It sounds like a trailer for a summer horror flick.
Friday the 13th.
Just after midnight.
A Saltville man, driving into town.
Suddenly, without warning, in his headlights, an alligator.
The police chief shakes his head, waving photos of the creature.
This is a true story.
And it is. Saltville Police Chief Steve Surber had the photos to prove it as he represented his town at the Relay for Life in Marion Friday evening.
Hours after the surprising incident was reported, Surber still had an expression of disbelief and amazement as he showed photos of a dead alligator, more than two feet in length, accidentally killed early that morning on Highway 107 in Saltville.
Jacob Daniel Ferley was headed into town when he saw the alligator “sitting right in the middle of the road.” Ferley said, “It had real bright orange eyes.”
Ferley said when he saw the animal, he centered his vehicle so it would pass over the ‘gator without hitting it as he tried to identify what he was seeing.
“I was thinking something like ‘iguana,’ but we don’t have those here.”
As Ferley approached, the vehicle “must have scared it, and I heard a little thump,” he said.
He parked and walked back to the animal that was still moving. “I didn’t believe what it was,” he said.
“I went home and told my dad I thought I hit an alligator,” Ferley said, then went back to get the alligator.
He took the dying beast to on-duty Patrolman Randy Brickey, Surber said.
Brickey turned over the reptile to the Smyth County Sheriff’s Department where it was placed in a freezer.
“Virginia wildlife officials picked it up later Friday morning and will have it examined to try and determine where it may have originated,” Surber said.
Surber said no one has reported a missing alligator, and he does not know how it got to Saltville.
A local animal welfare advocate said privately there are many cases of exotic animals, bought as pets when they’re small, being released into the wild when they grow larger than desired. Most do not survive.
In Virginia, owning alligators requires a non-game permit from the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries “to import, possess, or sell” them.
Releasing them is illegal. Virginia’s statutory code said, “It shall be unlawful for the owner or keeper of any exotic reptile or type of reptile not native to the Commonwealth of Virginia, including but not limited to the American alligator, to keep the reptile in any manner that will permit its escape or to knowingly permit the reptile to run at large. Any violation of this section shall constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor.”