ATLANTA — Zoo Atlanta officials confirm the venomous tiger rattlesnake that escaped from a quarantine building Friday slithered off zoo property and was killed by a neighbor on Sunday. The escape was the direct result of human error zoo, officials told Channel 2's Richard Elliot.
"We're disappointed that this happened," Zoo Atlanta CEO Raymond King told Elliot. "We never like to have something like this happen. But the key is we want to learn from it. We're determined to learn from it."
King and Zoo Atlanta Deputy Director Dwight Lawson said they got a surprise shipment of 16 rattlesnakes from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Thursday.
The snakes had been confiscated by the service and Zoo Atlanta agreed to take them in. As part of normal procedure, the snakes were placed in individual cages in a quarantine building near the rear of the zoo. At some point one of the cage doors was not secured by an employee and the tiger rattlesnake escaped, according to Lawson.
The snake slithered across busy Atlanta Avenue in southeast Atlanta and wound up in the yard of a vacant house. Zoo officials said the homeowner was mowing the yard when he saw and killed the snake.
Apparently, he didn't realize the snake was the escaped rattler until he saw it on the morning news and called Zoo Atlanta. Officials came over and confirmed it was their rattlesnake.
Zoo officials said they did put out warnings through the news media and through e-mails with the heads of local neighborhood associations, but they also admit they should have done more to alert nearby neighbors and the thousands of people who attended the three-day Grant Park Summer Shade Festival. Zoo Atlanta is located inside Grant Park.
"In hindsight, we should've knocked on doors in the closest area," said King. "We might have put something on video screens. So those things we'll look at again given the feedback."
Mimi Herrera-Peasy lives across the street from the zoo. She told Elliot she was at the festival and was upset to learn about the poisonous snake on the loose.
"I was very surprised," said Herrera-Peasy. "It's something they should've let folks know before the festival."
Officials said in their long history, this is the first time a potentially dangerous animals has ever escaped off zoo property. They vowed to make sure it never happens again.
"A good learning lesson," said Lawson. "We'll certainly look at everything we do and at everything that happened in his case to make sure it doesn't happen again."