Alligator ends up in back of patrol car, wearing seat belt, Florida video shows

A Florida sheriff’s deputy has captured the imagination of social media after he was seen giving an alligator a ride in his patrol car — and the predator was made to wear a seat belt.

It happened around 8:30 a.m. on July 25 after Deputy Nathan Richardson fished the alligator out of a swimming pool in St. Augustine, video shows. The gator was about 4 feet long, which counts as a juvenile.

“The alligator wasn’t happy its pool time was over or about the ride in the patrol car,” the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Aug. 2 Facebook post. “But it was buckled in and safely relocated to a nearby pond.”

Body cam video shows Richardson scooped the alligator out of the water with a net, grabbed it by the back of the neck and began talking to it as if it were a toddler.

“You’re fine. I know you’re super mad,” he is heard saying in the video. “You know what, let me buckle you in.”

The video had been viewed nearly 600,000 times as of Aug. 4 and gotten more than 9,700 reactions. Many noted the deputy was fearless and picked the alligator up “with his bare hands.”

“Treats this guy like it was his pet dog,” Jaynee Boucher posted on Facebook.

“This is how you can tell someone was born in Florida,” Sheila Carr wrote.

Richardson is from Florida, having been raised in Jacksonville, and he has worked for four years with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, officials told McClatchy News.

When asked via email about putting a seat belt on the gator, Richardson said: “I put everyone in a seat belt in my back seat so I felt like I should buckle the gator up too.”

St. Augustine is about a 40-mile drive south from Jacksonville.

This story was originally published August 4, 2025 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Alligator ends up in back of patrol car, wearing seat belt, Florida video shows."