After tracking down a small alligator skulking in a baggage claim area at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, authorities are now hunting for its traveling companion.
The Chicago Transit Authority has released a series of images showing a woman who they believe rode to the airport on a CTA train with the 2-foot-long gator in the early morning hours of Nov. 1.
Thanks to one of the most extensive surveillance systems in the United States, officials know this about the alligator’s trip to O’Hare: It boarded a train at the Pulaski stop — with the woman — at 1:17 a.m. The security camera captured the woman petting her little friend on her knee as she talked on her cellphone.
Blue Line rider Mark Strotman also snapped a picture of the woman and the alligator with his phone.
“She was sitting with it, petting it, letting people take pictures of it and telling everyone how she raised it from an early age,” said Strotman, 23, who initially thought the alligator might have been part of some “crazy Halloween getup” because it was on the train just an hour after Halloween turned into Nov. 1.
An hour later, the woman, presumably with the alligator, disembarked the train at the airport. At 2:44 a.m., she is again recorded by the security cameras near the O’Hare stop, but with no reptilian companion.
Strotman said given how fond the the woman seemed of the alligator, he suspects that it might have gotten away from her at the airport.
An airport employee found the alligator later in the day under an escalator near a baggage claim.
Officials name the creature Allie and gave it to the Chicago Herpetological Society.
“It’s not responding well to food. … It hasn’t had the proper nutrition. Its growth has been stunted. It has a bent spine, soft bones, soft fingernails and a soft skull,” said Jason Hood, president of the society.
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