Earlier this year, when a man in Pomfret, Maryland, realized he hadn’t seen his neighbor the day before, he walked over just to make sure everything was okay. Looking through a window, he saw that the man had collapsed.
First responders arrived, entered the home and pronounced the 49-year-old man dead – and they were greeted by a rather unusual gathering.
The house didn’t have much furniture, but it contained 124 snakes.
Pythons, rattlesnakes, cobras, black mambas and more – and not all were legal. A Burmese python was 14 feet long.
“Our chief animal control officer, in his more than 30 years of experience, said he had never encountered anything like this,” said county spokeswoman Jennifer Harris WRC TV.
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The man appeared to be an experienced snake owner.
“They were all very well secured,” Harris said. “They were blackmailed. He didn’t have a lot of furniture in the house, so there wasn’t a place for a snake to hide or harm anyone, for example.”
No wild snakes were found, so what caused the man’s death?
Snakes are now being unloaded in containers from the Maryland home where a man was found dead last night. @SegravesNBC4 has the latest minutes gone @nbcwashington pic.twitter.com/N9qlg1HCTv
— Tom Lynch (@TomLynch_) January 20, 2022
“Charles County Sheriff’s Detectives are conducting an investigation into the man’s death,” the sheriff’s office said Facebook back then.
“There was no apparent evidence of third-party negligence and the deceased was taken to the Chief Medical Examiner’s office in Baltimore for an autopsy.”
While the possible cause of death seemed fairly obvious to some, it took the Maryland coroner to determine that the man had actually died from accidental “snake poisoning,” according to the WRC.
UPDATE: A man found dead in a Charles County home with more than 100 exotic snakes in January died of a snakebite. Maryland Medical Examiner just ruled the death an accident. The cause was snake poisoning. @nbcwashington
— Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) April 13, 2022
Charles County Animal Control rounded up the harmless snakes but left the more dangerous specimens to the experts.
The man’s mother agreed to the snakes’ removal – perhaps she didn’t share her son’s fascination with reptiles – and the snakes were moved to two new homes.
All harmless snakes went to a licensed handler in Virginia and the venomous ones to a licensed handler in North Carolina.
https://www.westernjournal.com/man-found-dead-house-full-caged-snakes-official-cause-death-finally-determined/ Official cause of death finally established