Killer python tried to eat toddler, deputy medical examiner testifies
Just looked at one of our local news websites who has copied an article from another website... they title it "Killer Python" wtf... heres the article.. until otherwise I say its the owner's/parent's neglect in this entire situation...
http://www.wtkr.com/news/nationworld/os-killer-python-state-rests-20110714,0,5240763.story
Killer python tried to eat toddler, deputy medical examiner testifies
By Stephen Hudak, Orlando Sentinel
4:56 a.m. EDT, July 14, 2011
BUSHNELL — The pet python that strangled a 2-year-old toddler in her crib apparently tried to eat the child, a deputy medical examiner said Wednesday as testimony concluded in the unusual manslaughter trial.
The six-member jury is expected to begin deliberating Thursday after closing arguments.
Defense lawyers for the toddler's mother, Jaren Hare, 21, and the mom's live-in boyfriend, Charles "Jason" Darnell, 34, contend the child's death was a terrible but unpredictable accident, while prosecutors say the couple ought to be held criminally responsible for failing to keep the albino Burmese python caged.
Neither Hare nor Darnell testified or offered their own witnesses. They also ignored questions shouted at them by reporters as they left the courthouse together through a back door with a deputy sheriff as an escort. If convicted of manslaughter, third-degree murder and child neglect, the couple could be sentenced to 35 years in prison. They rejected a pretrial plea agreement that could have put each in prison for up to 10 years.
The tragedy occurred July 1, 2009, in the couple's small home in Oxford, 60 miles northwest of Orlando.
Assistant State Attorney Pete Magrino wrapped up the prosecution with deputy chief medical examiner Wendy Lavezzi, who decided the constrictor had coiled around Shaianna's face and neck and asphyxiated her.
"There were also several clusters of puncture wounds … that represent bites from the snake as the snake was trying to ingest her, basically," Lavezzi told grim-faced jurors who viewed post-mortem photos of the child.
The bite marks were on the crown of her head, her forehead, her cheek, around her mouth and her arms.
Magrino also displayed the girl's post-attack pictures to a snake expert as a counterpoint to defense arguments that the pet snake, which Hare bought for $200 at a flea market about seven years ago, was tame.
"Is that evidence of a snake being gentle?" he asked.
Testifying as an expert, Gainesville-area snake-farmer Eugene Bessette, who produces the reptiles for the global pet market, research and zoos, said a healthy female 5-year-old Burmese python like Hare's should measure about 15 feet in length and weigh about 150 pounds. Gypsy, as Hare had named the pet snake, was measured at 8 feet 6 inches and 13.5 pounds after the attack. Bessette termed her very thin, "almost unhealthy."
He said those depressed dimensions suggest a python that was "very, very underfed, undernourished." He said a healthy, well-fed python would grow from the size of a hot dog at birth to Gypsy's size in a year.
In the wild, the snake would be "very opportunistic," he said. "It would eat what it could find."
Bessette, who has 6,000 live snakes or serpent eggs incubating at his warehouse farm in Archer, described the glass aquarium from which Gypsy had escaped as "totally … incapable" of sheltering a Burmese python.
"It has no structure, no lid on top," he said. "It has no way to secure the animal."
The snake, which had not been fed since a meal of road-kill squirrel about a month before the attack, had escaped repeatedly from its tank, a 200-gallon aquarium with a quilt flopped over the top. Darnell found it slithering down the hallway of the manufactured home a few hours before Shaianna was killed, gathered it up, slipped it into a mesh laundry bag, tightened the strings and returned the snake to its tank.
But the laundry bag had a baseball-size hole in its side, and the snake had previously escaped from it.
Hare then heard her toddler cry about 1 a.m. and fetched the child a sippy cup of milk before going back to bed, according to transcripts of her interview with deputies. She and Darnell said they never heard Shaianna cry again.
The snake tank was situated about 12 feet from the toddler's room, which did not have a door.
The snake remains in the custody of the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission. Hare, who was about eight months pregnant with Darnell's child at the time, gave birth in August 2009 and has custody of the girl.
Darnell's two children, ages 12 and 7 at the time, were visiting at the time of the attack and asleep in the room with the snake tank. Their mother has custody of them.
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Photo of quilted snake aquarium and the baby's crib shown at killer python trial in Sumter County
at least we have a couple losers out of society for a while.
