Our Views: Beyond the call of duty

The Island Now

When a barely conscious driver with a python wrapped around her neck crashed through a firehouse door and into a fire truck last week, the brave firefighters at the New Hyde Park Fire Department jumped into action. 

It must have looked like a scene from the campy movie Snakes on a Plane.

First a brave female paramedic performed a pythonectomy safely removing the snake which by then had moved to the woman’s chest. The two-foot-long python, which had probably never dined on anything larger than a rodent, may have thought that it had killed its marinated prey.

Fortunately it didn’t.

The driver, Sarah Espinosa, was taken to a nearby hospital and was later arrested and charged with reckless driving, driving while intoxicated, and unlawful possession of marijuana in addition to reckless endangerment in the second degree and petty larceny after police said they determined that she had stolen the python from PETCO.

Espinosa’s alleged stupid stunt resulted in thousands of dollars of damage to the firehouse, a fire engine and her own late model Toyota Prius.

But the most remarkable part of this tale is the action taken by a fire chief and a medic before they learned that the snake had most likely been stolen. 

Assuming the python was a pet, they brought the snake to the home of Espinosa’s parents in New Hyde Park. That is going beyond the call of duty.

If the charges are true, there are a number of lessons to be learned from this unfortunate incident: don’t steal from the pet store; don’t drive drunk or high; and, if you’re going to be driving, make sure your python is strapped in.

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