Officer Spots Coiled Snake and Decides to Gopher Help

Gil Payne was concerned when, after a couple of tries, he couldn’t awaken a man who was asleep behind the wheel of his car, stopped in the middle of a Mission Viejo street.

Then Payne noticed a snake wrapped around the sleeping man’s neck.

The California Highway Patrol officer backed off, calling for an Orange County animal-control officer to remove the green, black and yellow reptile from the driver’s neck.

“Our officer arrived on the scene and removed from around the person’s neck a 2-foot-long gopher snake,” said Lt. Kevin Whelan of Orange County Animal Control. “It’s basically a useful snake around the property to control gophers . . . mice and (other) small rodents.”

Gopher snakes, which can grow to about three feet in length, are not uncommon as pets, Whelan said. Although their coloring is similar to some rattlesnakes, they are not poisonous, are not constrictors and generally pose no danger to humans.

“In this case,” Whelan said, “it just happened to be that the snake was wrapped around the person’s neck.”

The driver, identified by a Highway Patrol spokesman as Michael Russo of Mission Viejo, was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving--after the snake was removed.