Python may have killed Va. woman

By BILL GEROUX
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Published: October 24, 2008

A Virginia Beach woman apparently was strangled by her 13-foot pet python as she tried to administer medication to the snake, police said.

The husband of the victim, 25-year-old Amanda Ruth Black, found her lying on the floor late Tuesday night in front of a large, empty snake cage in an upstairs bedroom of their home, police spokesman Adam Bernstein said.

Animal-control officers found the snake, a reticulated python with tiger-stripe markings, in the room. The snake was “extremely agitated and required the force of two animal-control officers to restrain it,“ Bernstein said.

A preliminary autopsy showed Black died of asphyxiation caused by the compression of her neck, and investigators believe the snake killed her by wrapping itself around her and squeezing, Bernstein said.

Police had hoped to receive final word on the cause of death from the state medical examiner’s office before releasing information about the case, but word was spreading too quickly to wait, Bernstein said.

He said the python is being kept in the city animal-control facilities.

Bernstein said Black apparently was alone and trying to give medication to the snake. He said he had no further details.

There is no law against keeping such snakes in Virginia Beach, he said.

“Reticulated” pythons are so named because of their chain-link markings. Native to Southeast Asia, they are popular as pets.

Harry W. Greene, a snake expert and professor of ecology and evolutionary history at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said in a phone interview that deaths from pet pythons are “unusual but not unprecedented.“ No central records of such incidents are kept, he said, but “every few years, someone in the U.S. gets killed by their pet python.“ Among the most recent victims was a small child in Texas, Greene said.

A large python can exert pressure of 7 to 8 pounds per square inch—about as much pressure as an adult exerts on the ground when standing on one foot, said Brad Moon, a snake expert and associate professor of biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Greene said most pet pythons that squeeze and kill their owners do so by mistake. Either the snake feels threatened and wraps around the person in self-defense—as may have happened in Black’s case—or the snake strikes at a person and then coils after smelling food the person is offering to it, he said.

The squeezing shuts off the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain and can cause death in as little as a minute, he said.

Black’s husband, a Navy man who tried to revive her while emergency crews were en route, could not be reached yesterday.

Her MySpace page features a photograph of the python in her hands, as well as numerous other photos of pet snakes and cats.