snake in toilet alabama
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A bathroom break for one worker at an Alabama construction office ended with an unexpected scare when he discovered a four-foot long, venomous snake coiled in a toilet.

Willie Harris says he couldn't believe his eyes. "So when I was going to use the restroom, I see a snake around the commode and I'm thinking it was a joke."

But once Harris saw the snake move a few times, he knew this was no laughing matter.

"I pulled the door back a little bit and I said 'wow!" Harris said.

Harris's boss then called 911, and luckily help wasn't far behind -- Officer Alice Thompson.

"He said 'I don't think you understand how big this is.' I said 'OK.' He said 'I have a picture of it.' I said 'Well, by all means, let us see," Thompson said. "It was so much bigger in person."

Thompson says she quickly devised a strategy to get rid of the reptile without harming it.

"She had a baton, and she grabbed the other guy's baton and she grabbed the snake by the head."

"I was holding it actually on the corners of the mouth where the mouth was actually open at the time," Thompson said. "Which for me that was actually the first time I'd ever seen fangs that were folded back in a snake."

All of this, while Thompson's two male partners and construction workers huddled in a corner and watched.

Thompson then carried what she believed to be a venomous cotton mouth, out of the bathroom, and hopped in the back of her partner's cruiser.

"She crazy!" said Harris.

They then drove just down the road, where the officer released the snake back into the wild, unharmed.

"I said 'Lord have mercy.'"

"I looked at Officer Mitchell and I said ok it's time to go."

You could say it was the creature's lucky day. If Officer Thompson hadn't showed up, it could have definitely been a different outcome.

"Nah, he'd been dead."