The police have confirmed the death of a 36-year-old woman after she was found dead with a python wrapped around her neck in a home in the mid-western US state of Indiana, which housed around 140 snakes.
The body of Laura Hurst was discovered on Wednesday night, October 30 in the house in Oxford, a state police spokesman, Sergeant Kim Riley, said in a statement.
The home is reportedly owned by Benton County Sheriff Don Munson and is set up specifically for the snake collection.
The Police spokesman disclosed that Hurst kept about 20 of her own snakes in the home and usually visited it twice a week.
Sheriff Munson lives next door to the reptile house and reportedly saw Hurst at the home on Wednesday evening. Riley said a person found Hurst later that night on the floor with a reticulated python loosely wrapped around her neck. Metro UK reports.
“She appears to have been strangled by the snake. We do not know that for a fact until after the autopsy,” Riley told the Journal Courier.
Munson called Hurst’s death a “tragic accident with loss of human life,” adding that he was “being fully cooperative with everybody.”
Authorities said they plan to conduct an autopsy on Friday.
Pythons are a non-venomous family of snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia that encompasses more than 30 species, including some of the largest snakes in the world.
They typically grasp prey with sharp, backward-curving teeth before squeezing them tightly to induce a heart attack.
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