Once again, a Walmart shopper and a rattlesnake have crossed paths.
According to KATU News, Mica Craig was shopping in the garden department at a WalMart store near Lewiston, Washington, last Saturday. Craig, 47, says he reached down to grab what he thought was a stick in the gardening aisle. But it wasn’t a stick he picked up, it was a rattlesnake… which, in very short order, bit his hand.
A fellow shopper raced Craig to a local emergency room where doctors initially thought no venom had been injected. After going home, he returned to to the emergency room with his hand the “size of a grapefruit,” according to Reuters. He was then treated with 6 vials of anti-venom.
Craig has been issued an apology by Walmart. Reports indicate that Craig stomped the rattlesnake to death before he was taken to the emergency room.
This is not the first incident of a shopper/rattlesnake encounter at a Walmart garden center. At a Walmart near CP headquarters here in St. Augustine, Florida, in 2009, a man was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake in the garden center of a Walmart. A pygmy rattlesnake also bit a man at a Walmart in Viera, Florida back in 2006. Another snake incident happened in nearby Jacksonville, Florida, in 2006, when a woman was bitten by a non-poisonous snake.