An Indiana woman has been found dead with a huge python wrapped around her neck, after she stopped in at a house owned by the county sheriff and occupied exclusively by 140 snakes.
Laura Hurst, 36, owned approximately 20 of the snakes at the house in Oxford, Ind., according to Indiana State Police. However, the majority of the snakes — and the house — belong to Benton County Sheriff Donald Munson, who lives next door.
Munson found Hurst dead on the floor late Wednesday with the python wrapped loosely around her neck, he told the Lafayette Journal & Courier.
The sheriff called 911 but first responders were unable to revive Hurst.
The home had been set up to house the snakes and was otherwise unoccupied, State Police Sgt. Kim Riley said. Hurst kept her snakes there and visited them about twice a week.
“She appears to have been strangled by the snake,” Riley added in a separate interview with the Journal & Courier. He says an official cause of death will be determined through an autopsy on Friday.
Sheriff Munson told the paper that he is “being fully cooperative with everybody.” He described the incident as a “tragic accident with loss of human life.”
Hurst’s divorce lawyer, Marcel Katz, told the paper that her snakes were part of the legal negotiations.
“She had a real passion for snakes,” he said. “That was a big issue for her.”
The snake found around Hurst’s neck was a 2.4-metre (8-foot) reticulated python — a relatively small specimen of the world’s longest species of snake. The reticulated python hails from southeast Asia and can grow up to 10 metres long, although the average length is about 3.1 metres.
The reticulated python “is considered the snake most likely to consume a human,” according to the website Animal Diversity. The site says there have been many cases of pythons attacking people in the wild or turning on their owners.
Pythons typically ambush their prey, dropping onto them from above and wrapping them up in a fatal squeeze.
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