Va. Snake Saga Rattles Residents, Ends in Ban

Two years ago, Larry Koskinen stepped on a rattlesnake in his garage while putting away his lawn mower. Then Barb Misra spotted a five-foot snake in her garden. And last week, a 4-year-old nearly whacked an exotic serpent slithering along the sidewalk with her doll stroller.

Unnerved residents of the usually peaceful Madison Manor neighborhood in North Arlington are convinced the serpents escaped from what they call the Snake House, the brick house on Quintana Street with its manicured lawn, shades drawn and Christmas lights still up. It's where Peter T. Nguyen has lived for the past five years with his collection of rare, exotic -- and deadly -- snakes stacked neatly in clear plastic containers under warming lights in his garage.

But it took a plumber, a broken hot tub and containers of dead rattlers on a porch before the County Board decided to move swiftly to ban venomous snakes and other poisonous reptiles.

"This is not one of the harder votes that I've had to make," said board member Jay Fisette (D) after the unanimous vote yesterday. Although one private snake breeder suggested adopting a regulated permit system instead of an outright ban, Fisette said the urban nature of the county made that "impractical." Neighbors were unhappy that the ban would not apply to such non-venomous snakes as boas or pythons. But Fisette said the county is forming a regionwide task force to explore a wider ban on exotic or dangerous creatures.

Nguyen has 30 days to get his poisonous snakes out of the county.

The snake in Misra's garden was identified as a Northern Pine, a rare breed known to live in Virginia only in the Blue Ridge mountains. Melissa Koenig yanked her 4-year-old away from what turned out to be a New Guinea ground boa, or viper boa. A shovel-wielding neighbor called animal control, then trapped it in a recycling bin. Only the snake that Koskinen stepped on and killed, a juvenile Mexican Lancehead rattler, was venomous.

"This isn't about snakes," said Koskinen, a father of three, who lives next door to the Snake House. "This is about protecting our children. That my neighbor has something from Mexico or Africa that could kill my child violates the social compact in a profound way."

It took animal control more than an hour to identify the viper boa, known as the harmless "lazy snake" in its native Papua New Guinea for its slothful ways. But what if it had been venomous? Koskinen asked. What if it had bitten the 4-year-old with the angelic curls?

For a child, you often have 20 minutes, not 60, to figure out what kind of antivenin to use, much less find it, herpetologists say. Poison control officials said local hospitals stock antivenin for native venomous snakes: rattlesnakes, water moccasins and copperheads. Anything else would have to be found at the zoo.

Even though two of the loose snakes were found next door to his house and one in a yard that backs up to his, Nguyen says it would be "an impossibility of physics" for the snakes to have been his. He doesn't collect those species, he said, favoring instead rare African pit vipers. And those he does collect are kept in polyethylene terephthalate boxes, the kind of plastic containers used in labs to hold rodents, secured from the outside with bolts. "You have to undo the bolts with your fingers. . . . It's downright impossible for them to get out, much as a goldfish would have the potential to leave its bowl and go scampering about the community," he said.

He said he has no idea where the rogue snakes could have come from. (All are now on ice at local nature centers.) But viper boas are commonly sold as pets, he said. "Any kid could have saved his paper route money and gone to a pet store and gotten one," he said. And if the Mexican rattler were his, "I would have been out there tearing up the neighborhood looking for it," he said. "They're fairly uncommon and not a thing to lose lightly. It would be like misplacing a $1,000 money order."

Neighbors said they had been keeping their fears to themselves, trying to work things out among themselves, the "Arlington Way." Nguyen and Koskinen tell how when a sickening stench wafted throughout Koskinen's home, he asked Nguyen to do something about it. Nguyen apologized and explained that he had been on vacation when the freezer where he keeps rodents to feed the snakes broke down.