TOWSON TIMES (Maryland) 05 July 06 Snakebite brings excitement to GBMC (Loni Ingraham)

If it was a snake, it would a bit ya.

Well it was. And it did.

And that's why 15-year-old Alexander Doccolo was running through his front yard in Hampton June 20.

Only Alex wasn't running away from the snake, he was running toward it.

Alex had been mowing the lawn on a Toro tractor about 1:45 p.m. that day when, with no warning, the 4-foot snake jumped out of the grass and bit him on his left hand between the thumb and index finger.

His hand was bleeding when he stopped the mower.

Alex is not afraid of snakes. In fact, he likes them.

The house he shares with his mother, Sharon, and his 11-year-old brother, Nick, backs up to the Loch Raven Reservoir watershed, and Alex sees large snakes all the time.

Alex has a pet snake named Rocky in an aquarium in his bedroom; Nick has a snake named Twister.

"They love to take their snakes and hang them around their necks," says Sharon Doccolo, who can barely hide her disgust. "It's their thing. I don't like snakes. They just give me the creeps. They're just scary when they get beyond a certain size."

The family's two Labradoodle dogs, Harley and Beaner, are her thing. They peacefully co-exist with the household's pet snakes.

But the snake that bit Alex was a stranger. That presented a problem for Alex. If the snake was poisonous, he needed to find out fast.

As the snake slithered away through the grass and across the street, Alex jumped off the mower and ran after it.

He caught up with the snake as it was about to climb a tree, grabbed it by the throat and threw it into the tool box that Nick had ready.

"He's a real Crocodile Dundee type," Sharon says. "He was an avid rock climber by the time he was 7, and he's built platforms in our trees.

"He and Nick have grown up with four-wheelers and dirt bikes and lots of adventures. I don't remember him being afraid of anything."

Before the boys had a chance to call their mother, they saw her pull in the driveway, and soon the Doccolos and the snake were on their way to Greater Baltimore Medical Center's emergency room.

"Alex wasn't spooked at all," says Sharon. "He wanted to make sure nobody killed the snake. He thought she might have been a mother trying to protect her nest."

The boys' father met them at the hospital.

"Doctors and nurses were running in and out of the room looking for someone who knew about snakes," Nick says.

"Nobody wanted to open the tool box except for my brother. Everybody sat on the bed with their feet off the floor. It was pretty funny."

Finally a nurse showed up who had gone to camp a few summers. She explained that if the pupils of the snake's eyes were vertical or if its head was diamond-shaped it could be poisonous.

But that meant somebody had to get a better look - and everybody was afraid that if the tool box were opened, the snake would jump out.

After several doctors and nurses opened the lid just enough to peer in with a flashlight, they saw the snake remained still. Eventually somebody opened the tool box wide enough to get a better look.

The snake was pronounced not poisonous. It was a harmless black snake, and in the brief time it was in the E.R. it attained a certain degree of in-house celebrity.

"Even Alex's pediatrician called to hear the story," Doccolo says. "He never calls."

Later that day, the boys took the tool box to the stream behind their property and opened it. They saw the snake slither away, unaware of its 15 minutes of fame.



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• MD Press: Snakebite brings excitement - W von Papineäu, Thu Jul 6 11:35:18 2006