WINNIPEG – It was the kind of sight that would give many people a sssssinking feeling.
But Justin Wolters was more curious than creeped out when he spotted a snake Saturday morning along the edge of his kitchen sink in his Osborne Village apartment. And when he realized the 31/2-foot serpent wasn’t some sort of joke played on him by his girlfriend, he called police to capture it.
“I have no idea where it came from,” city police Const. Pete Breuer told the Winnipeg Sun at the building in the 300-block of River Avenue after getting the snake — which he said is likely a baby boa constrictor — into a cardboard box and taken away. “There’s no way it could have come out of the sink. There’s a grate there.”
Responding to Wolters’ 911 call, Breuer arrived alone to check it out.
“He was stoked for it,” Wolters said of the officer’s willingness to tangle with the creature, which hadn’t moved too much on the kitchen counter.
“He was like, ‘All right, let me see it.’ He was all for it.”
Though the snake was “pretty docile,” Breuer said later, he needed a few nearby tools to take it into custody.
“I didn’t hold it — I took a broomstick and pushed it into a box,” the officer explained. “We actually put it in the garbage first, then put it in the box.”
After the snake initially appeared to be “just chilling out there,” Wolters said, it became “a little aggressive” when bothered.
“It was pretty agitated when we tried to move it,” Wolters said. “I had kind of pissed it off a bit, poking it and trying to see if it was alive.”
Though staff from Winnipeg’s animal services agency eventually arrived to take away the already-corralled reptile, Wolters said he wasn’t impressed by the city’s early response to his 311 phone call.
“I said, ‘I have a snake in my apartment and it’s not mine. I don’t know what to do with it,’ ” he told the Sun. “They said they wouldn’t respond to that sort of situation. So then I called 911.”
Once the snake was carted away, Genevieve Krahn, Wolters’ girlfriend, could only wonder where it had come from — and how it had entered their first-floor suite.
“We have no idea how it got in. It’s pretty weird,” Krahn said.
Wolters suggested that the experience in the kitchen was almost amusing, when he saw the snake after getting up about 10 a.m. and wondering if it were a rubber toy.
“I thought it was fake, because she was the last one in there,” he said of Krahn, who had left the apartment before he was up.
“I was like, ‘Is she pulling a quick one on me?’ Then I tapped it with a knife, and it felt heavy. And I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Then I was kind of blown away — I was over my head, pretty much.”