Early this year when a man in Pomfret, Maryland, realized he hadnāt seen his neighbor the day before, he went over just to make sure things were OK. When he looked through a window, he saw the man had collapsed.
First responders arrived, entered the house and pronounced the 49-year-old man dead ā and they were greeted by a rather unusual collection.
The house didnāt have much furniture, but it did contain 124 snakes.
Pythons, rattlesnakes, cobras, black mambas and more ā and not all of them were legal. One Burmese python was 14 feet long.
āOur chief animal control officer said in his more than 30 years of experience, he had not encountered this kind of thing before,ā county spokeswoman Jennifer Harris said, according to WRC-TV.
The man seemed to be an experienced snake owner.
āThey were all very properly secured,ā Harris said. āThey were racked. He did not keep a lot of furniture inside the home, so there was no place if a snake, for example, were to escape where it could hide or harm anybody.ā
No snakes were found loose, so what had caused the manās Death?
āCharles County Sheriffās detectives are conducting an investigation into the Death of the man,ā the sheriffās office posted on Facebook at the time.
āThere were no obvious signs of foul play and the decedent was transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore for an autopsy.ā
While the potential cause of Death seemed pretty obvious to some, it took the Maryland medical examiner to determine that the man had, indeed, died of accidental āsnake envenomation,ā according to WRC.
Charles County Animal Control rounded up the harmless snakes but left the more dangerous specimens to the experts.
The manās mother approved the removal of the snakes ā perhaps she did not share her sonās fascination with reptiles ā and the snakes were taken to two new homes.
All the harmless snakes went to a licensed handler in Virginia and the venomous ones to a licensed handler in North Carolina.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.