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Dad wrangles visitor on first day of school. ‘There’s an alligator at the front door’

A Texas father thought it was a silly excuse for his daughter to stay home on her first day of middle school, but the reptile in front of the family’s Missouri City home was all too real.

“There’s an alligator at the front door,” the girl told her father as she walked back inside on Tuesday, Aug. 16.

Mike Trinh wouldn’t let the reptile hinder his daughter’s milestone day, so he took lessons from a famed crocodile hunter.

“All my years watching Steve Irwin, I figured I can deal with any wildlife as long as it ain’t a stingray,” he said in a Facebook post.

Photos show the alligator had maneuvered back to the driveway, where Trinh calmed it down by throwing two towels over its head.

He took his kids to school, and the alligator was still there when he got back.

Trinh said he wrangled the alligator by pinning its head with his knee, then mounting it with its jaw shut.

“In jiu-jitsu, it’s called ‘knee in belly.’ I had a knee on it, spun to the back, sat on it, and then grabbed the mouth,” he told KTRK. “Once you grab the mouth, that’s it. It’s done.”

He said his other daughter helped him tie up the gator’s mouth, and then he tied its legs.

Trinh made calls to wildlife officials to have the alligator picked up. But when no one immediately came for it, he took care of the gator himself by releasing it into a nearby lake, he said on Facebook.

“I think if (my daughter) told her friends at school, they probably wouldn’t believe her,” he told KPRC.

Missouri City is in the Houston metropolitan area.

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