Tommy McCombs kept his alligator is a plastic storage bin for a couple of years, and sometimes let him out in the front yard of his home in the 800 block of East Tyler Avenue. He allowed children to play with it, and tried to use a leash on it for a while, but that didn’t work out very well.

“He wouldn’t walk on it,” McCombs, 24, said of his bootleg pet alligator.

It’s just as well that the gator never learned the finer points of leash walking. “Gustav,” as he was named by McCombs, was seized two months ago by state wildlife officials and was taken to an area near the Red River where he was released. And McCombs was handed a hefty $696 fine.

Oklahoma Wildlife Commission Officer Shane Fields figures Gustav was about four feet long when he was seized and taken to the Red Slough cutoff of the Red River, near Harris in McCurtain County. It’s illegal to have gators in Oklahoma, where they are considered a threatened species. Still, the reptiles are finding a way into Oklahoma.

“They are very rare, but they are in this area,” Fields said. “More so in the southeast part of the state, toward the Idabel, Broken Bow area along the river. Occasionally they will get in the river and go through the river system and immigrate north.”

And sometimes, they get a little help.

McCombs said he found Gustav while at a state park in Texas.

“He was little bitty, about two foot,” the McAlester man recalled. “My nephew pointed him out and I reached over and caught him, bought him to Oklahoma.”

According to Fields, that’s illegal but it’s becoming more and more common. Oklahomans traveling through places like Texas and Louisiana collect alligators off the side of the road and bring them home.

“They think it will be a great pet, but a lot of times they won’t know how to care for them, or they’ll get thrown in jail and no one knows how to take care of them, and they’ll get released into our area,” the wildlife expert said.

Gustav is the third alligator Fields has seen in this region. Another about the size of Gustav was snagged in a pond close to Bugtussle where it had been taken after the owner was jailed.

“That was only a quarter mile from the lake,” Fields said, referring to the proximity of Lake Eufaula to the pond, and the meat-eating reptile.

A pond was what McCombs had in mind for his adopted pet, too. He planned to eventually move to a more rural home and fence off a pond for Gustav.

“He was pretty neat,” McCombs said. “He wouldn’t bite.”

Well, there was that one bite.

“It bit me one time and I kinda smacked it on the nose,” McCombs said.

Alarmingly, McCombs said he allowed children to play with the reptile.

“It didn’t bite me for a least a year before I let them play with it,” he said. “The teeth weren’t very big. Kinda like a needle.”

McCombs said he fed the small crocodilian raw meat and goldfish from a local bait shop. Gustav, though, was pretty picky about his fare.

“It’d eat any raw meat,” McCombs said. “If you cooked it, it wouldn’t eat it.”

Fields said the alligators he’s seen in the area are fond of turtles, which he found “fascinating.”

“I had a dead one before, and a lot of its insides were turtle’s shells and stuff,” he said. “I thought it would be fish.”

The game official said alligators, especially larger ones, are more common to the south of McAlester, where waterways link to the Red River.

“I haven’t experienced too many big ones here, but in other counties they have. Closer to eight, nine feet,” Fields said.

“In Hugo, Atoka, Hughes County, we usually get an alligator call a year in that part. It’s getting more common because of what’s happened. People are just fascinated by them and want to make them as a pet.”

So far, though, alligators and McAlester are a pretty rare pairing.

“As far as a native alligator coming up this far? I just don’t see it,” Fields said. “We don’t have that river system up here.”

Contact Kandra Wells at kwells@mcalesternews.com.