Charges Filed Against Owner Of Venomous Snakes Found At Mote

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Charges Filed Against Owner Of Venomous Snakes Found At Motel
Suspect Forced To Remove Snakes From Arlington County Home Following Ban
POSTED: 3:23 pm EDT July 14, 2008
UPDATED: 4:08 pm EDT July 14, 2008
FAIRFAX, Va. -- Investigators have identified and charged the owner of 17 snakes, including 12 venomous snakes, that were found Thursday night in a room at a Fairfax motel, according to the city of Fairfax Police Department.
Peter T. Nguyen, 39, met an Animal Control officer Saturday and was served with seven summonses for keeping the snakes as pets, a class three misdemeanor.
Related: Images From Scene

A suspicious odor coming from one of the rooms at the Hy-Way Motel in the 9600 block of Fairfax Boulevard was reported to police at about 9:30 p.m. Thursday. Officers found the snakes confined in containers. The renter, later identified to be Nguyen, was not present.
The room was secured overnight, and the snakes were removed Friday morning and taken to an exotic-animal zoo.
The venomous snakes included African puff adders, cottonmouths, rhinoceros vipers, albino cottonmouths, speckled rattlesnakes and a black-headed python. They were in plastic containers stowed inside vinyl bags. The housekeeping staff did not know the snakes were there.
Police said Nguyen did not stay in the room, apparently spending $70 a night to use it for snake storage.
Nguyen was forced to remove the snakes from his Arlington County home because of a ban on venomous reptiles that was enacted on June 15. In the spring, fearful neighbors complained about Nguyen's snakes to the county board. Neighbors blamed Nguyen for a series of snake sightings in the area.
About two years ago, Larry Koskinen stepped on a venomous rattlesnake in his garage. Barb Misra spotted a five-foot snake in her garden. Earlier this year, a 4-year-old almost ran over an exotic serpent on the sidewalk with her doll stroller.
Nguyen denied those snakes came from his house.
But a March incident in which a plumber showed up at Nguyen's house to fix a broken hot tub and found containers of dead snakes on the porch convinced county officials to move swiftly to enact the ban.
"This is not one of the harder votes that I've had to make," board member Jay Fisette said after the vote.
Nguyen has 30 days to get his poisonous snakes out of the county.
"This isn't about snakes," said Koskinen, a father of three, who lives next door to Nguyen. "This is about protecting our children. That my neighbor has something from Mexico or Africa that could kill my child violates the social compact in a profound way."
Two of the loose snakes were found next door to Nguyen's house and one was found in a yard that backs up to his. Still, Nguyen insists it would be "an impossibility of physics" for the snakes to have been his. He said he doesn't collect those species. The snakes he does collect are kept in the kind of plastic containers used in labs to hold rodents, secured from the outside with bolts.
On March 11, a plumber went unannounced to Nguyen's house to fix the leaky hot tub. When he spied 20 or so dead snakes in containers nearby, he called 911. Within minutes, police cars and an animal control van arrived. Nguyen said he refused to let the officers in; he hadn't done anything wrong. He said he explained that he had taken the dead snakes out of the freezer, at a researcher's request, to begin to "skeletonize" them.
Officers milled around Nguyen's property for more than five hours and peered through the windows of the garage with a scope.
Under Arlington County code, it was previously illegal only to "display, exhibit, handle, or use any poisonous or dangerous reptile in such a manner as to endanger the life or health of any person."
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