Three snakes, found in a dumpster, returned after theft

Brian Gundy was elbowdeep wiping out a snake cage in his Campbell home Oct. 8 when his cellphone started to ring.

Two days after five of the snake educator’s favorite reptiles were snatched out of a San Jose parking garage, Gundy planned to tackle grime in his home breeding facility and check Craigslist for leads on his lost animals.

But a San Jose PetSmart Inc. employee tracked Gundy down with exciting, if strange, news: Gundy’s stolen ball pythons Piper and Bob had been found. In a dumpster. And now she had them waiting in her apartment complex.

“I just felt so lucky,” Gundy said.

The duo arranged a snake reunion outside the employee’s building, and Gundy drove home to Campbell with two of his homebred creatures in tow ( both, he added, in “perfect health.”)

Within a day, PetSmart called again to say that a third snake — the Burmese python Shorty, named for his eventual 12-foot length — also had ended his sojourn in a dumpster. At least one man had discovered the snakes and alerted the pet store, Gundy was told.

Reached by phone Tuesday, a PetSmart employee at the Coleman Avenue store said the company has a strict no- media policy but confirmed that members of the chain’s San Jose team were involved in the reptiles’ return.

The chief question, Gundy said, is who found the snakes in a dumpster and how they got there, but for now that’s left to reptilian mystery; San Jose police have yet to provide Gundy an update.

“We wanted to do the right thing,” the PetSmart employee said.

Gundy had been transporting the reptiles in a black duffel bag Oct. 7 after a San Jose library demonstration before his arms tired carrying a plexiglass cage. He set the bag down for about a minute to load up his car, and in that time, the bag was stolen.

Now he’s missing only the 12- year- old lizard Stretch and blue- eyed ball python Whitey.

But with a week gone by — which Gundy spent at the North American Reptile Breeders Conference in Chicago — he’s not exactly optimistic.

Hundreds of fellow reptile experts recognized Gundy from news clips and asked for updates throughout the conference, he said, in an outpouring of love unlike anything he’d ever seen from the reptile community.

But Gundy has resigned himself to the fact that an unwitting burglar may have been intrigued — rather than scared — of at least one reptile that remains at large.

“Just rea list ica lly, maybe they decided to keep the lizard,” Gundy said.