An Edgewater man who allegedly killed 13 “eating size” alligators without a permit earlier this year was arrested Monday, Sept. 22 and charged with multiple counts of poaching, Brevard County Clerk of Courts records show.
Jacob William Latreille, 21, was charged with 13 counts of alligator poaching by Florida Wildlife and Conservation Commission officials. Volusia County Branch Jail records show Latreille was arrested on an out-of-county warrant and was booked on $6,500 bail.
An investigation by FWC officers showed Latreille had no hunting license, was not a permitted alligator agent nor did he have state issued CITE tags (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) to harvest alligators, and was not an authorized nuisance alligator trapper, wildlife officials noted in their investigative report.
Video showed man cleaning 5-foot alligator
Brevard County court records state the illegal alligator hunt occurred on the St. Johns River near the Hatbill Park boat ramp starting the night of April 19.
FWC investigators said they started looking into the case after they were sent Snapchat videos of a Mims man, Luke Landry, 25, cleaning alligators in his garage, a report states.
Both Latreille and Landry would later admit to killing the alligators, FWC investigators said.
It’s unclear whether Landry has been charged.
The three videos showed Landry cleaning three alligators in the garage of his April Lane home in Mims. One 5-foot live alligator with black electrical tape around its snout was seen in the videos, and Landry is later seen in the recording also cleaning a 4-foot alligator, FWC officials said.
None of the alligators seen in the video had visible CITE tags on their tails, FWC said.
FWC worked on getting a warrant for Landry’s home while conducting surveillance of his residence. For officer safety, FWC waited until Landry left the house on May 27, and then announced to his girlfriend that a search warrant was being executed at the home, wildlife investigators said.
Landry returned to the home as the search was being conducted and was detained and placed in handcuffs, the FWC report states.
Gator meat was fee for helping clean reptiles
Landry initially did not want to talk to FWC investigators, giving only general and hypothetical scenarios. About an hour after he was detained, he said “So, what do you want to know,” wildlife officials noted in their report.
Landry then told FWC investigators that the alligators were harvested using Latreille’s airboat and that Landry was not present for every hunt, the report states.
The Mims man said he knew Latreille because they worked together as restaurant kitchen hood cleaners with Florida Alarm in Merritt Island. He told investigators that the alligators were taken from the St. Johns River near Hatbill Park in Brevard County.
When investigators asked Landry if Latreille paid him to help harvest the alligators, he said that he received alligator meat for helping to clean the reptiles.
“He made dinner with some of the meat. That was sort of his fee for helping clean the alligators,” FWC officers wrote in their report.
Landry said Latreille took all the remaining alligator meat and transported it to Georgia, according to FWC investigators.
Seized cellphone videos show when gators killed
FWC investigtators seized Latreille’s and Landry’s cellphones and extracted information that showed several other men, including two from Titusville, and a woman, taking part in the hunts with Latreille, FWC’s report detailed.
It was not immediately known if they had been charged.
However, cellphone videos retrieved from Snapchat by FWC officials showed Latreille in his airboat chasing alligators on the St. Johns River, while companions caught the reptiles and threw them in a hatch on the deck of the boat, officials said.
There were many video recordings showing that on the night of April 19, Latreille and his companions caught seven alligators. Some were alive but most them were dead, FWC investigators said.
On April 24, a video showed a 5-foot alligator being caught and killed.
And a video from April 29 showed three dead alligators on the deck of the airboat and when the camera panned, two more dead alligators could be seen, officials said.
The video also showed Latreille operating the airboat throughout the night, between 10 p.m. and midnight, steering the vessel toward alligators and giving verbal instructions to others on the boat on how to capture the reptiles, the FWC report stated.
FWC investigators went to Latreille’s home on Log Cabin Lane in Edgwater and told him they were there to talk to him about the alligators he killed, the report states.
Latreille told FWC officials they killed the alligators over multiple nights. He said that with the help of Landry and a Titusville man, he killed the animals. The Edgewater man said that after catching the alligators, they would hide them in the front hatch of the airboat, according to the FWC report.
All the alligators were either shot with pistols, or caught with treble hooks and then shot, FWC investigators concluded.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Edgewater man arrested for killing 13 ‘eating size’ alligators in Brevard County
Reporting by Patricio G. Balona, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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