Va. Snake Saga Rattles Residents, Ends in Ban

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2008

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.

Then the plumber showed up.

On March 11, a plumber came unannounced to Nguyen's house to fix the leaky hot tub on the back deck. When he spied 20 or so dead snakes in containers nearby, he frantically dialed 911. Within minutes, police cars and the animal control van screeched up in front of the house and blocked the street. Nguyen said officers asked him whether they could come in. He said he replied no; he hadn't done anything wrong. He said he explained that he had taken the dead snakes out of the freezer, at the request of a herpetology researcher, to begin to "skeletonize" them.

For more than five hours, officers milled around Nguyen's property in what neighbors call the Snake Standoff. Officers peered through the windows of the garage with a scope. Whispered reports of labels reading "Black Mamba," "Boa" and "Rattlesnake" electrified the wide-eyed crowd that had gathered across the street.

Using the laptop in her van, animal control Officer Alice Burton searched local ordinances. The District, Falls Church, Fairfax City and Prince William and Prince George's counties ban possession of venomous snakes. (Alexandria is considering a ban.) Under Arlington County code, it is illegal to "display, exhibit, handle, or use any poisonous or dangerous reptile in such a manner as to endanger the life or health of any person." But that didn't cover dead snakes by the hot tub or live ones in the garage. And although neighbors did mention the loose exotic snakes, there was no way to prove where they had come from. "It's not like they're stamped with an address or wear a tag like a dog," Deputy County Manager Marsha Allgeier said.

As neighborhood pressure mounted, the county convened a task force and put a venomous reptile ban on the fast track. "The consequences of venomous snakes escaping and hurting someone were too great," Allgeier said. "We felt we needed to draw the line."

Nguyen, 39, is a quiet, private man -- neighbors profess seeing little of either him or the man he shares the house with -- with a hobby that he is well aware few understand. But to tell him to stop collecting snakes, he said, would be like telling Van Gogh not to paint.

Nguyen, who writes and edits advertising copy, would not say how many snakes he collects, only that it varies with births and deaths. County officials reported at civic association meetings that he at one time had "well over 100." Nguyen said his collection has ranged from the harmless, startlingly green tree boa, to the puff adder, a favorite, to a Field's horned viper, whose venom he described as "thermonuclear."

He said he has been fascinated with snakes since before he learned to walk. And he has been collecting them since he was 8, when he caught his first venomous snake, a baby western cottonmouth, while on vacation.

His snakes are specimens, not pets. A snake is not something you get emotionally attached to, he explained. You research its history, anatomy and physiology. You observe its behavior. You don't handle it; you "encounter" it. Like a stamp or tropical fish collector, you scour the Internet and international dealer sites to round out the genus or species lines of particular interest. And, if you're like Nguyen, there is nothing like the thrill of being able to raise and breed the kind of snake no one else can.

Fea's vipers, "dazzling" bright blue natives of Himalayan cloud forests with red striping, usually die in captivity. Nguyen has three. A rare Ethiopian small-eyed viper with green and black patterns is considered the "Holy Grail" in snake collecting circles. "Only one person in the world has kept one alive for more than six months, and that was me," he said.

Nguyen said he has never been bitten by a venomous snake. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports about 7,000 venomous snake bites a year in the United States, 15 of which are fatal. And if that were ever to happen, he said, he has access to a private store of antivenin. "When handled responsibly, there's no contest between man and snake," he said. "They've got a brain the size of a lentil. If it bests you, you should think about keeping hamsters."

Still, since the plumber incident, Nguyen said he has been quietly moving his snakes to other locations. He won't say where: "I've had enough trouble here. I don't want it to follow." He has promised that the county can inspect his house to make sure it's empty.

Maybe then, he said, the neighborhood can once again be at peace.