The Holy Thursday Massacre
Written by Uma Raja
There’s an intruder in the Garden of Eden. He has slithered past the trampoline bathed in moonlight and nestled inside the sturdy row of potted plants.
It’s a brisk night for April in South Florida. A slight chill lingers underneath the skin. As the python coils, his brown scales flicker with illumination from the string lings glimmering on the fence.
Onya Golightly has wrangled wild snakes before, but never one like this. At just 16 years old, she now stands face-to-fang with a python so massive that her three-foot snake hook feels like a flimsy child's toy against his monstrous bulk.
Just minutes before, her father had burst through her bathroom door, wild-eyed and breathless. He called out: “Put on some shoes!” Golightly tossed her toothbrush and snatched her hook, her shoes, her phone. They sped to the snake in their car, using information from a neighborhood watch notification that announced the spotting.
Her breath slackened as they arrived at the backyard.
As she creeps towards the python, time slows to a trickle. Golightly moves with deliberate motions, her trembling hand hovering inches above the 10-foot snake.
In one swift, practiced motion, she lunges and clamps her fingers around the back of the snake’s colossal head, her grip fierce to prevent it from sinking his fangs into her arm. The python reacts instantly, his tail wrapping around Golightly’s legs, constricting as quickly as a tightening fist and cutting off her mobility.
Pressure amplifies as the python contorts his torso, looping around her father’s arm, locking them both in a tangled lasso of scales and sinew. It is a violent swing dance, in which Golightly and her father are unwilling partners, being twisted, turned and pretzeled.
The fight becomes a blur of adrenaline – a chaotic 12-minute struggle against raw power and animal instinct. Every swivel of the snake’s body is a battle for dominance. Every second feels like an eternity in a cold-blooded vice grip. Golightly fights with the strength and focus of a warrior, devoted to proving herself, and grateful for all the deadlifts at weightlifting class this week. With patience and persistence, Golightly and her dad wrestle the python into a blue tightly-zipped duffle bag and then, once home, into an unassuming pillowcase in the Golightlys’ guest bedroom. He slumbers in the shallow darkness, awaiting an uncertain fate.
Frederick, a 10-foot reticulated python, hiding on top of potted plants. Credit: Onya Golightly.
Golightly’s catch was a reticulated python, a prohibited species in Florida that is illegal to own. They share the pythonidae classification with Burmese pythons, an invasive species at the top of the food chain in the Florida Everglades.
Burmese pythons devour marsh rabbits and gobble up native birds. Nonvenomous, they rely on ambush hunting and constriction to capture their next meal. A viral photo from Everglades National Park shows the visceral scene of a six-foot alligator bursting out of a 13-foot python’s stomach after the gator corpse was swallowed whole.
Generalist predators, pythons are not picky about what they eat, and they stretch elastic tendons in their jaws to guzzle prey as large as deer. A severe decrease in mammal populations in the Everglades is now blamed on them.
The creatures are native to the steamy marshes and jungles of South and Southeast Asia – mostly in Bangladesh, India and Thailand. Most of those Everglades pythons were once pets – domesticated animals that can grow up to 23 feet and weigh 200 lbs – released into the wetland by negligent owners who grew tired of raising them.
Many underestimate the size that their pet snakes might reach, as some pythons can grow from a hatchling to 10 feet long in a little over a year. They are popular for their docile nature, but as they grow larger and are held less, a snake may accidentally bite a hand it misidentifies as food. The pet is then labeled aggressive. The novelty wears off, and Floridians unlock cage doors and send snakes slithering into the sawgrass. Their numbers multiply during their annual breeding season, where they lay an average clutch of 32 babies, but occasionally deliver up to 100 eggs.
When Hurricane Andrew ripped off rooftops and eviscerated neighborhoods into piles of rubble in 1992, it is also rumored that it demolished a breeding facility for Burmese pythons. As the shrieking 165-mile-per-hour gusts subsided and the sheets of rain slowed to drizzle, surviving pythons slunk over splintered fragments of furniture and slithered between shards of glass, escaping into the safety of the Everglades.
There is no official count on the number of invasive pythons in the Everglades, according to McKayla Spencer, coordinator of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) Nonnative Fish and Wildlife Program. Due to their exceptional hiding skills and elusive nature, she says, there is only a five percent chance of detecting a python. That means for every five pythons hunted and killed, another 95 go unnoticed.
Golightly, 8, in the car with her first pet snake Renegade. Credit: Onya Golightly.
The evening after making her catch, Golightly returns home from school and lets the snake out of the pillowcase to slither onto the guest room floor. She is careful to keep his face away from her. Wild snakes are aware of their intimidating size, conscious of the strength within their coiled muscles and their needle-like fangs.
But the snake does not snap at her. He doesn’t even fidget.
This isn’t a wild snake. This is someone’s pet, a domesticated animal that either escaped or, much more likely, has been abandoned.
Golightly is rarely seen without her childhood pet snakes – Renegade and Osceola – perched upon her shoulders. Her friends have learned not to reach into her freezer for ice cream, lest their hands brush upon dead rats.
Golightly’s passion for snake breeding begins when she is six. Her dad gives her a ball python, and two years later, he adds one more: a snake she named Osceola. Osceola had been owned by her father’s work friend and hadn’t been held much. Golightly is prepared to be bitten.
The python is only a few months old, with flakes of shedding skin clinging to a small body that fits in the palm of 8-year-old Golightly’s hand. She draws him a bath and gently lowers her hand into the warm water, waiting for the baby snake to latch onto the log she has placed. But Osceola doesn’t want to move. He sits in her palm and looks up at her with reflective black eyes. Time seems to shelter the two of them. For fifteen minutes, there is no one else in the world.
In 2022, Golightly sees Renegade laying a clutch of seven babies. That’s how she learns that Osceola is not a girl and Renegade is not just fat. Her father helps her fasten together a homemade incubator using mesh from the backyard screen door, a plastic container, a water heater, a cinderblock and Pedialyte to trap moisture.
That’s the day Golightly officially becomes a snake breeder.
When Golightly captures the homeless pet python, she names him Frederick. And with her father, she calls the law enforcement agency that governs wild and captive animals – the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, or FWC – to help find Frederick a permanent home. She imagines the sweet snake relaxing under heat lamps in another state – perhaps Georgia – cared for by a fellow snake-lover.
The next day, FWC officers arrive at the Golightly house and carry Frederick away, promising that they would, in fact, find him a good home.
“Little did we know that they lied to us,” Golightly says.
Although she doesn’t know it at the time, Golightly’s phone call ignites an explosive chain of events – an incident so well-known in the reptile community that it is given a name: The Holy Thursday Massacre.
On April 29, 2021, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission bans ownership of Burmese pythons and affiliated snake species. Snake owners with prohibited species scramble to say hasty goodbyes and send their animals to new owners in other states. Snakes that can’t be rehomed are supposed to be eligible for an exotic pet amnesty program offered on the FWC’s website.
Chris Coffee, a yard maintenance worker who breeds snakes for a secondary income, owns over a hundred snakes when the new law suddenly makes most of his pets illegal. Coffee manages to rehome all but around 30 snakes before the 90-day grace period ends. He contacted the FWC, giving them an inventory of his remaining pythons and asking for help.
The agency takes Coffee’s inventory list and uses it to issue him 72 misdemeanor citations for illegal possession of a prohibited species.
Coffee spends $20,000 on lawyer fees and eventually gets the charges expunged. But the Florida Wildlife Commission puts the snakes under what is known as “constructive seizure,” meaning Coffee and his business partner Bill McAdam can continue to care for them if they do not move them. If they do, they risk jail time.
The two men are forced to pay $4,000 a month for rent on McAdam’s warehouse, to feed all the snakes and to cover legal fees for 15 months. They are not allowed to sell the pythons to reptile enthusiasts in other states to recoup expenses.
“Nobody cares about all the money I’ve lost, or spent on lawyers, or the food out of my kids’ mouth, or that we lived in a motel for five months,” Coffee later says.
At 52 years old, Coffee is forced to return to the strenuous labor of mowing lawns seven days a week, pausing for lizards and frogs as they skitter through the grass. Despite owning pet snakes for three decades, the FWC’s restrictions destroy his business, and his family is evicted from their home.
McAdam owns a cleaning supply company and started breeding reticulated pythons as a retirement plan. He became fascinated by snake genetics after attending a reptile show in 2010. He was enchanted by the pets cloaked in scarlet and gold – miniature dragons that rest in living rooms and curl around human shoulders.
The prohibited reptiles that Coffee and McAdam own remain in purgatory from 2021 until April 2023, when Golightly and her father met Frederick in a quiet suburban backyard about 13 miles away.
In Bangladesh, the blistering heat is year-round, a permanent humidity that is shackled to the air. Networks of mangrove roots, gnarled as bony hands, plunge into ebony brackish water. Bangladesh’s Sundarbans Reserve Forest is home to the largest patch of mangrove forest in the world and to most of the country’s Burmese python population.
“It’s very similar to the Everglades,” says conservation biologist Shahriar “Caesar” Rahman, co-founder and CEO of Creative Conservation Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving wilderness in Bangladesh.
As seawater tides in the Bay of Bengal clash with freshwater currents from the Ganges River, a mother python seeks out a dry spot to lay her eggs, escaping from the deadly flooding that inundates the Sundarbans twice a day. She incubates her clutch for three months, keeping her babies warm by continually shivering her muscles.
A newborn snake pushes through his eggshell, his patterned skin glistening like diamonds in the harsh sunlight. From the moment he emerges, his life becomes a struggle for survival. While the death of the Burmese python is celebrated in Florida, here in their native range, the snake is imperiled, a vulnerable species one classification below endangered.
When the stomach of a Burmese python whines, he may follow the acute heat sensors in his jaws and the chemical receptors in his flickering tongue to pens full of plump goats and succulent chickens. He may also find a farmer who points the polished barrel of a gun to his snout. He might dodge the erratic swipes of a curved blade, weaving through pairs of legs, as indigenous people hunt him for food.
His one respite is climbing tall trees, looping through the branches like furled fettuccine. Yet he can still be snatched by poachers lurking in the darkness, kidnapping him to fuel the West’s exotic pet trade. It is estimated that 300,000 Burmese pythons were imported into the United States between 1979 and 2009.
Rahman has studied the Burmese python in Bangladesh since 2011. Seeing the chaos caused by the snake in the United States, he was given $7,000 in funding to study the snake in its homeland.
Shipping pythons from Florida to Bangladesh might seem like a potential solution, even if it’s an ironic one. Yet the practicality and financial burden of moving thousands of snakes across the world is daunting. Florida pythons may introduce deadly diseases and parasites that decimate Bangladesh populations. Plus, Bangladeshi farmers already lose precious livestock to pythons each year.
The leopards that once dappled the forests of Bangladesh have vanished, and Burmese pythons have been crowned with the task of keeping the herbivore population in check. In Florida, pythons are taking the place of predators missing from the Everglades, such as red wolves, panthers, foxes, coyotes and eastern diamondback rattlesnakes.
“You have two rabbits and you have one coyote. The coyote is going to keep that rabbit population in check, but if you kill the coyote, you're going to end up having a thousand rabbits in no time,” says Ivan Alfonso, an Orlando herpetological veterinarian who serves the exotic pet industry. “So now you think that a thousand rabbits is normal, and then you introduce something bigger and it starts eating the rabbits, and now suddenly you go, the poor rabbits are disappearing. No, they're not. They're getting controlled.”
Daniel Parker, director of media for the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, says that the mammals have bounced back in the natural way ecosystems balance predator and prey.
Small raccoon hands began delving into trash cans, fishing for half-chewed pizza crusts and soggy microwave dinners. Their reproductive systems worked overtime, and the baby raccoons born from the human food surplus annihilated nests of endangered crocodile eggs until the python population spiked in the 2000s. Crocodiles were changed to a threatened species, a reclassification Parker credits to pythons eating raccoons.
“There have been certain impacts that are not negative. Sometimes negative impacts are exaggerated because the organizations want funding for either research or eradication efforts,” Parker says. “There’s a certain amount of nativism and xenophobia involved that it's okay to demonize anything that we don't consider native. Every living creature is out there trying to survive, trying to do what all creatures do: eat, reproduce, and live. That’s all that pythons and any other nonnative species that are established are trying to do.”
Pythons have integrated themselves into the food chain. It is not uncommon for them to be found in the stomachs of alligators. Bobcats have been reported feeding on snake eggs. Parker recalls a raccoon that was documented distracting a mother python away from her nest so others could sneak in from behind and feast on her eggs.
Still, the FWC reports that it euthanizes an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 pythons each year. They do it because Floridians cry out for the rabbits that once dotted the riverbank and for the symphony of bird calls that have slowed to a staccato.
So, Florida goes to war on the python.
Every year, for 10 days in August, the public is invited to venture into the Florida Everglades and kill pythons. The Florida Python Challenge is part of a $3.4 million dollar endeavor to control pythons, a game where participants kill snakes and have 24 hours to turn in the carcasses at check stations dispersed throughout the Everglades. No dogs or firearms are allowed, but air guns and bolt guns are popular weapons. Making the offer more enticing is the possibility of winning up to $30,000 in cash prizes. The bigger the snake, the larger the sum.
The challenge was first held in 2013 and then again in 2016. Governor Ron DeSantis turned it into an annual event in 2020. The isolated dirt pathways clog with vans from national media intent on filming the spectacle.
Some competitors are professional contractors hired by the FWC. Some are military veterans, finding relief from their post-traumatic stress disorder by using their hyperawareness to spot the hiding snakes. But most are novices, including children, who do it for fun.
The event is so difficult and so competitive that it’s not uncommon for people to cheat. Michael Kirkland, a python check station leader and a senior invasive animal biologist at the South Florida Water Management District, recalls past years where necropsies at the University of Florida analyzed the tissue composition and gallbladder of snakes to conclude that frozen pythons had been fraudulently entered for prize money.
In the 2023 challenge, 1,050 participants removed 209 Burmese pythons from the Everglades.
“For the time and resources that's put into a 10-day event, we don't consider it a management strategy,” Kirkland says. “This is designed to engage the public.”
A $25 entry fee and a 45-minute online course qualifies anyone to participate in the challenge. Many animals suffer due to improper techniques used by their hunters.
“Specifically with the novices, I think they struggle with proper euthanasia,” says Cortney Tyson, who has helped run a python challenge check station for three years. Tyson has a distinct empathy for snakes, reminiscing on the rescue of a juvenile brown water snake from a pool with her 4-year-old daughter.
As the day of the challenge approaches, trucks chug into squelching mud with loose python vertebrae clattering in cup holders. One woman wears custom-made jewelry of the snakes she’s hunted, two elegant fangs poised beneath her ears. The interior of her car has been replaced with shimmering python skin.
As the sun sinks below the Everglades, the only relief from the pitch blackness is the distant twinkle of light seeping out of Miami. Crickets sing and swarms of bugs hum. An otter leaps from a flat patch of dirt, casting ripples as its sleek body touches a canal. An ibis flies overhead, the ghostly flap of white wings extended in the darkness.
Python hunters drive through the marshland slowly, waving searchlights out of windows that bathe banks of spindly sawgrasses in bright white light. Gold and emerald eyes stare back – the reflective gleam of spider eyes. Searching for the glint of a snakeskin pattern requires an impressive amount of perception.
Before the Florida Python Challenge, killing the snakes was illegal, and keeping them as a pet was allowed. In 2010, the FWC classified Burmese pythons as “conditional species,” meaning they could be owned with a permit.
“The Conditional Species Act made it as difficult to get a Burmese python as a fully automatic rifle,” says Michael Cole, star of the National Geographic show Python Hunters. “People that really wanted them would have to do a lot of research, build the right cages, be inspected, get microchips, know what they're getting into.”
Cole has been intrigued by snakes since his childhood in Pennsylvania. He had his first pet garter snake at age 5 and learned how to capture black rat snakes at age 11.
Cole would crouch on the front porch and peer into the darkness, the tempo of his heartbeat accelerating to match the engine of his father’s emerging car. If he was lucky, his Baptist minister father would be holding his hunting gun in one hand, and a gun case filled with a wriggling snake in the other. If he was unlucky, the gun was concealed inside the case, and the only thing his father had brought home was a warm hug. Cole liked that, too.
Back in 2009, Cole was one of the first to suggest removing invasive pythons from the Everglades, albeit without killing them. He captured a Burmese python on the first day of Florida’s then-humane removal program and in 2010 became one of the stars in three seasons of Python Hunters.
“They paid us to travel around the world, and at the time, we could catch Burmese pythons in the Everglades and relocate them or keep them rather than having to euthanize them,” Cole says.
Cole helped to pass conditional species regulations, removing invasive breeds from pet stores and ensuring that only educated owners could care for pythons. He believes that when a species of pet becomes illegal, owners are forced to choose between euthanizing their snake or letting the animal be free in the Everglades, contributing to the overpopulation problem.
In 2013, the FWC begins supporting the killing of snakes instead of the relocation of them. Despite being one of the first to advocate for python control, Cole can’t be complicit in the mass slaughter of an animal he has always admired. That same year, he resigns his license and retires as a python hunter.
“They’re not this big bad, giant horrible creature that's eating everything in his path and wiping out endangered species. Why are we spending millions of dollars every year?” Cole says.
When a baby snake dies, Golightly coats a tiny belly in black paint with delicate strokes. She slowly stamps the scales on a sticky note, each pattern as unique as an infant’s fingerprint. She opens up her pet remembrance drawer, full of water bowls and favorite hiding logs, and slips the scrap of paper inside. Even if she didn’t have much time with a baby, she grieves the unique personality she will never get to know.
For Golightly, breeding snakes is more exhilarating than opening presents on Christmas morning. She springs out of bed and shines a flashlight on her snake eggs, admiring the red veins that streak through the eggshell like lightning bolts and peering at the silhouette of an embryo – a little life that she helped grow herself.
Baby pythons use a small face tooth to chip through the egg, sticking out just their heads for a full day. Even with the heads bobbing out, it’s hard to determine what they look like. The appearance of a baby snake is far more random than the results of mixing two breeds of dogs, especially when the parent snakes carry multiple genes.
Golightly uses a calculator on the website Morph Market to see the probability of her baby snakes’ appearances. The most valuable snakes she’s ever bred are super gravel ball pythons, which flaunt high-contrast back markings resembling the segmented yellow lines that divide lanes on the freeway. They routinely sell for $600 to $700.
After the egg yolk is absorbed, the babies slither out in a rainbow of colors and patterns. Some make their debut into the world with sassy snaps; others hide shyly in the fragments of their egg. When the entire clutch emerges, the babies pick a corner and huddle in a cozy cuddle puddle. Golightly scoops them up and cradles them together in one hand, the unmistakable pride of a mother radiating out of her smile.
Golightly’s snakes burrow through the blankets of her unmade bed – occasionally getting stuck tunneling through her hair – and create a python jungle gym out of sparkly pillows and childhood blankets. Some snakes can live up to 15 years in captivity, and she views her pets as lifelong companions that will travel to college with her.
Golightly knows each of her snakes’ personalities well. She knows which ones are feisty, like the aptly named Aries, and which are reliable cuddlers. She opens the cage and a young python comes right to her.
“She just wants to have human contact with you,” Golightly says. “I have a couple of snakes like that. Being able to connect with those animals in that way makes me feel amazing.”
Golightly ensures that the snakes who prefer white rodents don’t get brown ones. She vanquishes each speck of dust or mold with veterinarian-grade cleaner, meticulously checks that everyone has swallowed their food properly and greets her snakes with enthusiasm each time she returns home from school. She sobs when she speaks of her dead pets and believes that snakes can attune to the calmness of their owner, sensing the pulse of a wrist through their soft and sensitive stomachs.
Golightly’s snakes breed in cold conditions, some females rapidly tapping their tails on the ground like rattlesnakes to indicate that they’re ready. She’ll pair them with a male for a week at a time, a mating process that involves locking the tips of their tails together like a pinky promise. She just hopes that the female snake wants to have babies soon, as ball pythons can retain sperm in their system for over a year and choose when they become impregnated.
Golightly holds a clutch of young snakes that she bred in a “cuddle puddle.” Credit: Onya Golightly.
After a gestation period of around 50 days, the mother snake creates a tight circle with her body and lays the eggs inside the snugness of her form. She wraps around her clutch and lays her head on top of her babies to protect them.
When Golightly is not thinking about snake breeding, she’s probably thinking about softball. She’s buff, with a competitive energy that sparks on the field. It’s a fiery trait she inherited from her father, a former MMA fighter and Division I football player. As a Black girl heavily involved in a predominantly white sport, she sometimes feels like she sticks out. Some say she’s mysterious, with a neutral resting face that rarely involves a smile.
“The people I have crushes on, they are these poor little white boys who are terrified when they see me,” Golightly says.
She reflects on a day in her high school gym where she and a group of brawny men were testing their deadlifts. The hulking weight pushed Golightly to the brink of her abilities. She huffed, sweat beading down her forehead, as she nudged the weight upward. There was victory until she saw the look on her crush’s face, a patchwork of shock and intimidation that she’ll never forget.
Like her pet snakes, there is more to Golightly than outward appearances. Her inner circle of four close friends knows her as talkative and caring. They wave hello to her pet snakes on FaceTime and celebrate with Golightly at a favorite restaurant when she makes a big python sale. So does her dad.
Daniel Golightly is the kind of man who will jump out of the car to scoop up a crab scuttling on the road or to pick his daughter up from school with a softshell turtle in the backseat. While he originally brought home snakes because of the business prospect of selling them, he grew a love for his daughter’s pets. He enjoys letting them out for air in the backyard, especially his personal favorites: Renegade, Osceola, Pearl and T'challa.
Golightly often walks in on him researching the best softball summer camps for her or reviewing a video of her swing. He is supportive and unwavering, qualities he also brings to events such as wheelchair boxing matches – part of his job as a personal trainer for people with special needs.
In a true testament to his love for both his daughter and her snakes, Daniel Golightly sacrificed the spare room he was using as his man cave to become a snake haven. The room is still colored by walls painted garnet and gold, with a giant Florida State Seminoles flag splitting down the middle. But now, instead of a giant TV, it houses a snake rack, a narrow dresser with drawers full of snakes that prefer tight conditions. The comfy couch overflows with heat lamps and humidifiers. In this suburban sanctuary – a modest Florida home the same color as a ripe banana – live 19 ball pythons, including six babies, and one hognose snake. There are also three dogs, two cats and a bearded dragon. There are humans in the house, too, like Golightly’s stepmom and brother. But in the eyes of Golightly and her father, the snakes will always be number one.
According to the FWC’s website, the exotic pet amnesty program rehomes prohibited species to adopters throughout the United States, flying the pets out through airline cargo. The FWC encourages people to reach out, and when it comes to arranging the flight, they will even work around the schedule of the owner surrendering their pet.
When Golightly finds Frederick hiding inside potted plants, she dangles the snake hook in front of his face to judge his temperament. The python flinches, retracting back in fear. As Golightly wrangles the world’s largest species of snake, her only concern is for the python’s safety.
“I was freaking out a little bit, but not scared that he was going to bite me, scared that he was going to hurt himself badly,” Golightly says.
The day after her phone call, FWC officers arrive and issue Daniel Golightly a written warning for the possession of a prohibited species. They took Frederick away and kept him overnight.
The next morning is April 6, a Thursday during the holiest week of the year for observers of the Catholic Church. Believers spend the week reflecting on the Last Supper and the eventual crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The day Judas betrayed his master, handing Jesus over to authorities to be killed, is known as Holy Thursday.
Frederick is taken to a rural area, away from the bustle of human civilization and far from Golightly’s yellow house, perhaps the only place he had been treated with a loving touch. The gentle giant is tackled to the gravel between tufts of stiff grass as officers draw a mental map above his head, an X between the eyes and the jawbones. It’s the ideal space for a bullet to penetrate the brain.
The bolt gun presses against Frederick’s forehead and, for a brief moment, a silence clings to the air. Then, a bullet thunders through the skull of an abandoned pet, and he dies, despised.
Wildlife officers assume that Frederick had escaped from McAdam’s facility in Sunrise, Florida. Yet that scenario is highly unlikely, Golightly says. It would mean a snake over 10 feet long traveled 13 miles to reach her neighborhood in the city of Hollywood without being noticed.
Plus, the FWC has an inventory of Coffee’s snakes, and Frederick is not one of them.
Regardless, officers are told to go to McAdam’s warehouse and remove the snakes.
Thirty-five more animals will be slaughtered that day.
Body camera footage shows two FWC officers entering McAdam’s warehouse. The FWC claims Coffee was given the choice to have the snakes removed alive, but an officer tells Coffee that he cannot make any promises about what will happen. They could be given to someone else, or they could be killed. Coffee can’t stand the thought of either. Later, he tells a local news station that he felt cornered. He signs a release, authorizing the snakes to be euthanized on site.
Rows of pythons press their wriggling bodies against transparent terrariums, waiting their turn as the officers begin systematically shooting them in the head with bolt guns.
“We’re killing the dude’s pets,” one officer admits on the footage.
Twenty-eight reticulated pythons and six Burmese pythons are plucked from their enclosures and executed on the bloodstained floor. The process takes over three hours. Officers know it will be alarming. They tell the local police department in case there are reports of frequent gunshots.
As they work, the officers hold different segments of the snakes, facing fangs and dodging defecation. Two additional FWC officials are called in to help wrestle the massive pythons to the ground as they contort around their killers’ arms in self-defense.
Coffee can’t witness his pets being killed. He leaves the room in distress.
"Every one of those snakes came out of an egg that I nurtured for six months in an incubator, cut it open, and got it to eat and live, every single one that you just killed," Coffee tells the officers on tape.
He reminds them repeatedly not to kill the 12-year-old boa constrictor named Big Shirl, a legal species of snake owned by McAdam, who had been placed in an enclosure labeled “R. Dragon #1.” Boa constrictors are one of the few species of snakes that give birth instead of laying eggs, and her sides are bloated from the young who are to be born in two months.
Big Shirl is pregnant with 32 babies, 14 of which display the rare and difficult-to-breed coloration known as “red dragon,” an albino and blood morph with double recessive genes. Despite having piercing red eyes caused by albinism, instead of being white, the boas display vibrant red hues which can range from coral to crimson. McAdam estimates the babies are worth $100,000.
An officer snatches Big Shirl from her enclosure as she raises her jaws in protest. It is over in the crack of a bolt gun. As the officials realize their mistake, one of them presses his gloved hands against his forehead in stunned silence. Twenty minutes later, they break the news to Coffee.
“Oh my god, why? Hell, I reminded you ten times!” Coffee yells, throwing a chair across the room in frustration. “You just killed something that wasn’t illegal, and it had about $100,000 worth of babies.”
By the time McAdam arrives at the warehouse, the massacre is done. The air is thick with the lingering scent of gunpowder and the sharp iron of blood.
McAdam wades through the carnage to spot Big Shirl, remembering when the innocent boa constrictor once fit in the palm of his hand. The FWC has a code called “Humane Killing Methods for Nonnative Reptiles,” the first step being, “your method should result in the animal losing consciousness immediately.”
The second step includes destroying the python’s brain in a process called pithing – inserting a screwdriver into the snake’s cranial cavity and rotating the tool to destroy the cerebral cortex and brainstem so the animal does not suffer.
“No one’s telling you that you have to go get rid of your pet or euthanize it. No one from the state’s going to take it away from you,” says FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto during a 2021 commission meeting on prohibited species.
But McAdam says he watches as Big Shirl writhes on the floor in pain for over 20 minutes, fluid leaking out of her skull.
Around her, limp corpses litter the blood-splattered ground, frozen in panicked loops.
When a new officer enters the warehouse to help wrestle the snakes, he mentions he has only handled one other python before. Another official reassures him, saying he did not need to practice using a bolt gun before killing the animals.
The officers seem not to notice the twitches of half-dead snakes as they are loaded into garbage bags. While they don’t appear to take joy in fulfilling their duties – lamenting that they don’t want to kill animals who are not suffering – it does not stop them from posing for a trophy picture with a dead snake.
“From the veterinary perspective, it really was a massacre,” says Alfonso, the veterinarian who serves the exotic pet industry. “The way they killed those snakes, that was an execution.”
When McAdam sees the puddles of blood smeared on his warehouse floor, he asks who will clean up the mess. The officers get on their hands and knees and scrub the bloodstains with paper towels.
“These are domestic animals that learn to trust you,” McAdam says. “How would you like to do that to a dog? You train the dog to trust you, and then one day, you just put a bullet in his head.”
McAdam feels the officers treated him and Coffee like drug dealers, walking into the warehouse with a friendly demeanor, only to turn on them like undercover informants. He believes FWC officials follow the law only when it suits their needs, without caring who is hurt in the process.
“We're not criminals,” McAdam says.
Parker, the director of media for the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, sees the event as a black eye on the history of the FWC and believes it deserves more backlash for what happened.
Alfonso also notes that organizations that are typically quick to jump to the defense of cute or cuddly animals are mostly silent when the cruelty is on snakes.
“You don't hear people complaining about stray cats,” Alfonso says. “We call them, in vet medicine, nature's adorable serial killers. The face has to look like a villain. So snakes, unfortunately, fit the profile.”
Domesticated cats kill between 1.3 to 4 billion birds and up to 22.3 billion mammals each year in the U.S. alone, with an average outdoor cat bringing home 24 rodents, 15 birds and 17 lizards annually. The Burmese python, according to Cole, eats just 6 to 15 meals a year.
“It’s very convenient to blame the reptile,” Alfonso says.
Coffee and McAdam hope that the abundance of video evidence will bring justice to them and their pet snakes. However, the FWC officers who carried out the Holy Thursday Massacre have not faced disciplinary action. Coffee and McAdam are in the process of suing the FWC. The FWC is appealing, claiming it has immunity, and the appellate court is reviewing the case.
Golightly dresses her pet snake Pearl in a hat. Credit: Onya Golightly.
No law can extinguish the bond with a pet, and snake owners remain animal lovers who find solace in the tender trust of a misjudged creature.
While many ache to twist back time to a wild Florida, where the pristine cry of a red wolf echoes above cathedrals of arched sawgrass, before the pythons and the parking lots, before the stain of human sin, the Garden of Eden is gone, and it will not return.
There’s an open secret that no one wants to voice, a hushed gospel that rings true: the Burmese python is here to stay. And as the sun streaks orange over a new day in the Everglades, a clutch of newborn snakes peek through the cracks of an eggshell and flicker forked tongues at the place they know as home.
There is no number of bolt gunshots that can ring out and change that.
As Cole puts it: “Short of God laying his hands in the Everglades, wiping those pythons out, we’re not going to eradicate them.”
Snakes have been villainized throughout human history: their hiss, a tantalizing whisper in the Bible; their presence, a hideous curse for Medusa, a symbol of deceitfulness and an emblem of sin. To empathize with the Burmese python, to look these invasive snakes in the eye and acknowledge them as beautiful animals, is to be turned to stone by the common narrative.
Although it is Eve who bites the apple and the irresponsible who unlock the pet cages, it is the snake who pays the price – hated, feared, and above all, misunderstood.
Uma Raja lives in Miami and is passionate about stories that center on wildlife and the environment. She has been published in National Geographic for her article on the threatened Florida burrowing owl. Raja received her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and is currently working on her MFA in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia.
