Hungry eight-foot pet python kills two-year-old baby girl

A mother is facing up to 35 years in jail for third-degree murder after the pet python she treated ‘like a puppy’ squeezed her two-year-old daughter to death.

Jaren Hare, 21, and her boyfriend Charles Darnell, 34, went on trial in Florida, two years after they found Hare’s daughter Shaianna dead in her cot in July 2009, with their albino Burmese python, Gypsy, coiled tightly around her and its fangs embedded in her forehead.

Investigators say that the 8ft 6in serpent had not been fed for a month and was kept in a tank at their rural home in Oxford, Florida, with only a duvet thrown over the top, tethered loosely with bungee cords and safety pins, to try to prevent it from escaping.

Prosecutors say that the episode was more than just a macabre accident and that Shaianna died as a result of criminal neglect by the couple.

Though the snake was the ‘instrument of death’, Darnell and Hare were responsible for ensuring the child’s safety but showed ‘reckless disregard’, they assert.
‘Those two adult defendants are responsible for the unlawful death of Shaianna Hare,’ assistant state attorney Peter Magrino told jurors as the trial opened today.

Gypsy had slithered out of her unsecured tank at least five times in the previous four weeks alone, jurors will hear, including once the night before the toddler was killed, when Mr Darnell found the snake squirming along the hallway and popped it back in its tank.

The next morning, he found it wrapped around the little girl’s lifeless body, trying to eat her. He stabbed the reptile several times with a six-inch knife and a meat cleaver to get it off Shaianna, but too late to save her.

‘The baby’s dead. Our stupid snake got out in the middle of the night and strangled the baby,’ he sobbed to an emergency dispatcher after dialling 911.
A post-mortem examination revealed that the little girl died of asphyxiation by the non-venomous python, which kills prey by tightening itself around them until they can no longer breathe.

Friends and family had repeatedly offered to buy more secure quarters for the snake or to look after it themselves, worried that Darnell and Hare – who were unemployed – could not afford to feed it, and concerned for the safety of Shaianna. But their offers were refused.