Following the collision of their truck with an alligator that was crossing a highway, a pregnant woman and her unborn child perished.
Authorities informed STexasNews that on Sunday morning, 33-year-old Gabrielle Breaux was travelling on State Highway 35 in Refugio County, Texas, when she struck a sizable alligator.
According to the Refugio County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were called to a vehicle that was travelling on a highway close to Farm-to-Market Road 775 when it “hit an alligator and then rolled over.”
The truck was carrying two adults and three children. All of them were rushed to nearby hospitals.
‘We pray that these people are all okay,’ wrote the sheriff’s office.
Deputies were dispatched to the scene shortly after 5am.
Breaux, of New Iberia, Louisiana, was taken to DeTar Hospital in Victoria. She was pronounced dead around 5.45am, according to Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Sgt Harold Mallory.
Attempts to save Breaux’s unborn baby were not successful.
The four other people in the truck are expected to recover, Mallory said. Their identities have not been disclosed.
Their relationship to Breaux was not immediately known.
Images from the scene shared by the sheriff’s office showed a dark-colored pickup truck tilted on its right side in a grassy area near bushy trees. Several sheriff’s and fire vehicles were stationed nearby with their lights flashing.
Another photo showed a dead alligator lying on its back on a road.
The accident happened north of Corpus Christi, which is at the east end of Texas on the Gulf of Mexico.
American alligators are ‘common in swamps, rivers, bayous and marshes of the southern US, including the eastern third of Texas’, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
The incident happened more than eight years after a man allegedly hunted down a crocodile that he believed ate his wife who was two months pregnant. Mubalak Batambuze spent almost two months looking for the 24-foot crocodile and speared it, according to officials at Lake Kyogain in Indonesia.