BATON ROUGE - Police and professional trappers were called out to a restaurant on Corporate Boulevard late Monday night after a roughly 8-foot alligator showed up in the parking lot.

"I thought someone was walking a dog, and someone called the cops on them, but turns out it was an alligator," James Lamy, a server at Mansurs on the Boulevard said.

Law enforcement went to Mansurs on the Boulevard a little before 10 p.m. after the animal was seen on the side of Corporate Boulevard.

Officers dragged the gator back into the woods near the restaurant, but the reptile was insistent and returned soon after. 

"It feels like a central place in Baton Rouge, so to have an alligator was crazy," Charles Taucer said.

Video from the scene showed a trapper guiding the gator into a pipe so they could move it.

T-Mike Kliebert, owner of Kliebert & Sons Gators Tours, says while this may be an unusual event for the workers, it is common for gators to get lost while they migrate looking for food or a place to lay eggs.

"Gators can travel. They'll live in a ditch, they'll live in a culvert if that culvert retains water for a while," Kliebert said.

Though trappers initially hoped to relocate the animal, the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries told WBRZ the gator had seemingly been hit by a car prior to the parking lot encounter and that the animal had to be put down.