14 DAY TRIAL // An elementary school teacher living in California faces animal cruelty charges after police officers raided his home and found several hundred pythons, most of which were dead.
Information shared with the public says that investigators arrived at Bill Buchman's house after receiving several complaints from worried neighbors who said that something inside the teacher's home smelled really bad.
Despite knowing that the teacher liked to breed snakes, his neighbors assumed that the unpleasant odor was coming from garbage that had no business being in the house, and not from hundreds of dead snakes.
The Orange County Register details that the raid took place this past Wednesday. All in all, police officers recovered 182 live pythons and 240 dead ones.
Of the snakes that were still alive when they were found, many were malnourished and had several health issues, including respiratory problems and oral infections commonly referred to as mouth rot.
“Worst case I’ve ever seen. Two years ago, we found 110 cats in an 800 square-foot home. This is much more severe,” Sondra Berg, animal services supervisor with the Santa Ana Police Department, told the press.
Apart from these hundreds of pythons, several dozen rats and other rodents were found living in the teacher's home.
Apparently, Bill Buchman kept them as food for his pythons, but did not do a very good job looking after them.
Thus, media reports say that, due to lack of food and water, some of these rodents had turned to eating each other in order to survive.
Police officers and Bill Buchman's neighbors suspect that the teacher stopped being merely a snake breeder and turned into a hoarder back in 2011, after his mother passed away.
Thus, it is believed that the emotional shock he suffered at that time contributed to his collecting ever more snakes and failing to properly look after them.
Now that they have been rescued, the pythons have chances to end up either in nature centers, or in biology labs at various schools across the country.