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Canadian authorities were trying to determine yesterday how an enormous snake slithered into a living room where two young brothers were sleeping and squeezed the life out of them in the dead of night.
Noah Barthe, 4, and his brother, Connor, 6, were strangled in the predawn hours Monday when the 100-pound African rock python escaped from its enclosure, slid through the ventilation system and fell through the ceiling into the boys’ room.
The horrifying incident has shocked the small town of Campbellton, New Brunswick, and led to a criminal investigation.
The night they were killed, the brothers were having a sleepover with their best friend, the son of Jean-Claude Savoie, who owns the Reptile Ocean pet shop below the apartment where the Barthe boys were staying.
“I thought they were sleeping until I [saw] the hole in the ceiling,” Savoie told Canada’s Global News.
“I turned the lights on, and I [saw] this horrific scene.”
Savoie had the 14-foot long python for at least 10 years and was the only person who handled the powerful reptile.
“My body is in shock. I don’t know what to think,” he said. “I can’t believe this is real.”
Savoie’s son was sleeping in another room and was unharmed.
Friends and family members of the adorable little boys were grieving for the animal-loving brothers yesterday.
“It’s like a bad dream,” Shawna MacEachern, a friend of the boys’ mother, told The National Post newspaper. “She loved her babies. They meant everything to her.
“They were both so sweet. They were fun-loving, typical little boys,” she said.
Their great-uncle held back tears as he remembered his nephews.
“They were two typical children,” Dave Rose said. “They enjoyed life to a maximum.”
Investigators originally believed that the snake had slithered out of a cage in the pet store sometime Sunday night, but it was determined yesterday that it had been inside the apartment all along.
A reptile expert from New Brunswick said the python may have picked up a scent from a farm where the the boys were playing the day before, and mistook them for an animal.
“If a snake sees an animal moving, giving off heat and smells like a goat, what is it? It’s a goat,” Paul Goulet told Canada’s Brandon Sun newspaper.
The python lived in a large glass aquarium that reached up to the ceiling of Savoie’s apartment, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
It somehow managed to escape through a small hole in the ceiling that was connected to the ventilation system. The snake then made its way through the ventilation system and moved toward the living room where the boys were sleeping. The pipe collapsed and the snake fell.
The young boys’ tragic deaths are now being treated as a crime by police in New Brunswick.
Autopsies on both youngsters were being performed yesterday.
A family spokesman said the brothers spent Sunday at Savoie’s family farm playing with different animals before sleeping over at the apartment.
The Natural Resources Department in New Brunswick said that no permit was issued for the pet python and that officials were not aware that it was being kept inside Savoie’s home.
An African rock python is generally allowed to be kept only in an accredited zoo, unless there is a special permit.
“It’s a criminal investigation,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Alain Tremblay said at a news conference in Campbellton. “We’re going to look at all avenues.”
The python was euthanized yesterday by a veterinarian in New Brunswick
A necropsy will be performed on the snake to try to determine why it attacked the children.
Savoie’s pet store — which he had once operated as a zoo — has had its detractors before.
A resident of the town last year started an online petition to have Reptile Ocean shuttered because he argued the animals were kept in poor conditions.
The petition drive, however, gathered only 185 signatures.
The town’s deputy mayor, Ian Comeau, said the shop was licensed to operate and “everything was according to our bylaws, to the provincial guidelines.”
No charges had been filed in connection with the tragic incident as of last night.