Elton, Va. -
When Jarrette Arlo Dean got bit by a rattlesnake, he bit back, and took the
critter's head to clean off.
The snake head,
severed from its body, bit him twice more before breathing its last.
Dean, 44, who
lives in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, is recuperating at home after being
hospitalized several days.
"They said
it was a miracle he's alive," his 19-year-old daughter, Tina, said
Saturday.
Doctors said
Dean was in shock when he got to Rockingham Memorial Hospital "and almost
dead," according to his daughter.
His family, from
a community called Naked Creek, doesn't know what possessed him to bite off the
snake's head last Saturday.
"He said it
had bit him first so he bit it," his daughter said.
She said her
father was riding his bicycle when he spotted the rattler, more than 3 feet
long, and got off to catch it. "He's not afraid of snakes," she said.
Holding the
snake in one hand, he continued his trip, but the snake bit him on the thumb
and fingers, so he headed for a friends house.
When he got
there, angry at being snake-bit, he retaliated in kind. But when he went to
take the head out of his mouth, the dying snake bit him on the tongue and lip.
Inside the
house, his mouth began to swell, so a nephew drove him to the Elkton Emergency
Squad, which took him to the hospital.
He was released
Wednesday, but his daughter said he could not speak for several days after the
incident. (Rattler gets last bite after man chomps its head. United Press. International Deseret News 8/1/1993)
