Mechanics’ reptile skills pay off
Bobby Byers rescues the snake from under the car seat.
Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter
Ben Rush, left, and Bobby Byers talk with reporters Friday about the previous day’s snake rescue.
Car dealers probably don’t normally ask prospective employees about their experience with reptiles.
But that didn’t stop two mechanics at Washington’s Budd Baer Inc. from putting their longtime love of snakes and other-cold-blooded creatures to good use on Thursday when a driver asked for help getting her pastel python, Rosco, out from under a seat in her car.
Bob Byers holds Rosco after the rescue.
The woman was driving with her 3-foot snake wrapped around her arm when it slithered under the seat of her Chevy Impala, said Alyssa Delaney, an express adviser in the dealership’s service department. She’d been on her way to a store in Washington Crown Center, North Franklin Township, to find out the snake’s gender.
The woman had recently purchased her car there and went to talk to her salesman.
“She said, ‘Oh by the way …,'” Delaney said Friday.
The salesman referred the woman to the service department.
Delaney said she remembered that her co-worker Ben Rush has pet snakes at home. She turned to him to help the woman.
“It was constricted insanely tight around the seat frame,” said Rush, who works in the Murtland Avenue dealership’s express department. “The amount of strength these snakes have to constrict is just phenomenal.”
Bobby Byers holds Rosco while Ben Rush examines the snake.
Delaney said Rush, 27, of Chartiers Township, was bitten by the snake, which is not venomous, but it did not penetrate his skin.
Rush’s fellow reptile handler, Bobby Byers, 31, of Washington, services Mazdas at the dealership. He joined in the snake rescue.
“We were more or less concerned with the safety of the snake,” said Byers. The pair managed to save Rosco without cutting the snake on the sharp seat frame.
They recounted Friday afternoon that they spent about 20 minutes working as a team to help coax the snake out of its hiding place.
Byers, Rush and Delaney didn’t know the woman’s name, but Rush was able to tell her the snake was male.
Like Rush, who breeds snakes, Byers keeps reptiles at home. Both grew up in the country – Rush in Eighty Four, Byers in Banetown – and started handling reptiles when they were young.
Bob Byers and Ben Rush extricate the snake from the vehicle Thursday.
“It’s just in us. I started off young with iguanas,” Byers said. “When I moved out on my own, I started getting into snakes.”