Pensacola, Florida
When a traffic officer pulled a pickup truck onto an Australian highway, he wasn’t expecting to find one of the world’s deadliest snakes indoors.
The driver, a 27-year-old man identified only as “Jimmy” in a police press release, was heading to Dawson Highway in Queensland at 100 km per hour (62 mph) when he noticed crawlers in the car.
It was an Eastern brown snake – highly toxic, which is responsible for the majority of snake bite deaths in Australia.
“Whenever I moved my legs … I just started turning around. Jimmy said in the press release that his head had just started hitting the (driver’s seat) chair between my legs.
Then use a seat belt and a nearby knife to fight it – while trying to park the car.
Jimmy believed that he was bitten in a post-conflict and feared for his life. The bites of the eastern brown snake are fast acting and deadly, and the poison can cause paralysis and bleeding in the brain.
So Jimmy killed the snake, hit the metronome and went to the nearest hospital. This is when a police officer discovers his car, driving at 123 km per hour (about 76 mph) and pulling it.
“I heard a brown snake or a tiger snake in the back of the ute (truck), I think she bitten me, she was with me in the car,” you can hear Jimmy saying while the officer was riding, in a video released by the police. “You can feel my heart, my friend.”
The officer saw the dead snake lying in the back of the truck and asked for help. When the paramedics arrived, they decided that Jimmy was not bitten, but he was in shock.
“It was very terrifying, I was never happy to see the red and blue lights,” Jimmy said in the video.
