July 22 (UPI) — Police in British Columbia responded Thursday to a report of an alligator loose inside a high-rise condo building, but arrived to find a realistic sculpture.
Constable Jason Douchette, of the Vancouver Police Department, tweeted that officers were dispatched about 7 a.m. Thursday to a condominium building in which a woman reported she was hiding in a stairwell from a loose gator inside the building.
Douchette said officers were relieved to discover the alligator was a “realistic fake” — a gold-colored sculpture.
He said the sculpture, while the wrong color for an alligator, was sufficiently detailed to cause a person to panic.
“Running up [a] secluded stairwell, rounding the corner and suddenly coming face to face with this … ‘clean up, aisle one’ for me,” he wrote.