While on a fishing trip with his family, an eight-year-old Costa Rican boy was attacked by a crocodile, mauled and beheaded, as he was swept away into the river.
The child had been playing in knee-deep water in the river, along with his parents, four siblings and some other family members on October 20.
The attack was in full view of the rest of the family, leaving them shocked and horrified.
The child’s body, mauled and decapitated, was found weeks later in a crocodile’s belly, after it was shot by a hunter near where the child was killed.
It is illegal to kill crocodiles in Costa Rica, and the hunter fled the scene, but locals cut the reptile open and found evidence of the little boy inside.
The boy’s parents, Don Julio Otero, his father, and his mother, Margini Fernandez Flores, helplessly watched as their boy was grabbed, decapitated, and then dragged under by the reptile.
Local media reported that Mr. Otero said that the police who responded to the scene of the attack said they did not have the authority to shoot the crocodile. Mr. Otero felt that the authorities had let him and his family down, and that they valued a reptile’s life more than his son’s.
The couple had moved from Nicaragua to Costa Rica to work on a banana plantation. After the loss of their son, they hope to move back to Nicaragua and take their four surviving children to a place where they are not vulnerable to reptile attacks.
The boy’s mother said that in Costa Rica, the government protects the reptiles, who are a danger to people at the river, and she couldn’t imagine going through another tragedy like the one she and her family suffered through.
Though inconsolable, she said she was glad that the crocodile had been shot and killed.