LANCASTER NEW ERA (Pennsylvania) 18 July 08 Woman bitten by python lurking in closet (Cindy Stauffer)
Grace Ulearey was standing in front of her closet at about 6 a.m. Thursday, getting ready for work in her third-floor apartment on North Shippen Street.
Selena was lying under a dresser in Ulearey's closet but Ulearey didn't know that at the time.
The two hadn't met quite yet.
But Selena saw movement from her dark, cozy lair and thought: Hmm. Breakfast!
And then she bit Ulearey on the toe.
"Being a girl, I jumped on my bed and screamed," says Ulearey, a 20-year-old who works at a day camp for kids.
Ulearey did not know that a 4-foot ball python had escaped from the apartment underneath hers and slithered into her closet in her apartment, across from Musser Park in the city.
She just knew she had been bitten by SOMETHING and needed to get out of there fast.
"I'm thinking, 'I need to call my mom,' " Ulearey says.
In fact, it wasn't until later that morning, after both Ulearey's mom and her family doctor examined the three little puncture marks on Ulearey's tender and tasty second toe, that it started to sink in what had happened.
Both said, yep, that's a snake bite.
Ulearey decided to go to work, but she was thinking "Oh my God, something's in my apartment."
Yes, there was.
Ulearey asked her mom and stepdad to investigate while she was at work. They went over to the apartment, opened the closet, moved the dresser and there was Selena.
They promptly called city police.
Animal control officer B.J. Martin responded, finding two other officers who arrived before her "holding the snake at bay.
"The snake," Martin notes, "wasn't about to go anywhere."
"I just reached into the closet and picked it up," says Martin, a low-key woman who has been the animal control officer for 13 years and owns two snakes, Special K and Cruiser.
About then, Ulearey arrived home.
"I wasn't really looking at it," she says of Selena. "I'm still kind of scared of it."
A woman who lives on the second floor of the apartment building apparently is the owner of the snake. The woman, who owns several snakes, is away on vacation and her two roommates did not notice that one of her snakes had escaped, said Katie Stewart, of York County, who was leaving the apartment building this morning after a visit to the roommates.
So how did Selena get from the second floor to the third floor?
Why, she took the steps, of course.
That's what Martin guesses, noting that snakes are agile climbers. Once Selena got upstairs, she was looking for a small, dark place to hide.
Today, Selena was at the Humane League of Lancaster County, where she will stay until her owner can claim her.
Martin and Ulearey have very different opinions on snakes.
Martin, who already has bathed snakes she's found on calls in her very own bathtub, thinks they make fine pets for those who understand their care.
But she understands that others don't share her opinion, noting that even seasoned city police officers sometimes get a little skittish around the scaly creatures.
"It's like they come up against a crazed killer on drugs, they're OK," she says. "But they're afraid of snakes."
So is Ulearey.
"I don't like any animals, anything with fur or skin or that slithers," she says firmly. "I'm not an animal girl."
For her part, she is definitely glad the whole snake encounter thing is in the past.
"It was a little weird sleeping here last night," she says.
And she's not ready to make friends with Selena quite yet.
"I'd like to say that I think she'd make a better belt, than a pet."
Woman bitten by python lurking in closet

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