If Jaws made us never want to get into the ocean again, this story makes us never want to take another bath: earlier this month, fifty-year-old single mother Veronica Rodriguez of College Station discovered a twelve-foot python kickin’ it (figuratively speaking) in her bathtub after having briefly left the backdoor open to put her pet guinea pigs in their cages. As The Eagle paper in Bryan-College Station reports:
“As soon as I turned on the light, that’s when I saw it,” she said. “It was crawling into my tub.”
Immediately, she slammed the door and ran outside. While her mother called Rodriguez’s brother to see if he could go help, Rodriguez said she called 911 and soon College Station officer Tony Gonzales arrived.
“When the officer showed up, he came with a brown paper sack,” she recalled. “I told him, ‘you’re going to need a bigger sack than that.'”
Gonzales, who’s been with the police department about five years, said he’d previously responded to three snake calls, but nothing like that.
“When I opened her bathroom door, there was a 12-foot python,” Gonzales recalled. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with a snake that large.”
“You’re going to need a bigger sack than that” is the sort of pithy statement that would make a great line in a movie a python terrorizing a Texas college town, but the tale of Rodriguez and the snake—and her guinea pigs—lacked the sort of drama that would have made it a blockbuster. Thankfully for Rodriguez and her daughter, as well as the tiny prey animals they keep as pets, no physical injuries were incurred.
That python may have believed that trio of guinea pigs would make a tasty appetizer, but Rodriguez had every reason to be terrified. While a fully-grown woman is an unlikely source of food for a python, it’s not technically impossible for a snake that size to swallow a human being whole. As the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters explains:
Although there have been reports of children and animals – including deer! – being swallowed by large pythons, it’s very unlikely that a fully grown human being would allow him or herself to get ingested by a serpent. “You’d have to be passed out beyond words,” says Snell.
(“Passed out beyond words” is not exactly an uncommon condition in a college town…)
The actual owner of the python—who somehow managed to emerge from the news cycle about this massive snake that intruded in a neighbor’s bathtub without being identified—was able to reclaim the snake without incident. All’s well that ends well, and aside from the terror that Rodriguez will presumably encounter every time she enters her own bathroom for at least the next few weeks, everything turned out all right here.
(image via flickr. Not the same snake.)
