An incident over the weekend has left Kirk Dwyer a bit perplexed over why anyone would leave a live venomous snake at his front door.
Dwyer, who owns Chancy’s Grill and Shake in Moran, spoke to the Register about the bizarre chain of events Saturday outside his home in Fort Scott.
He had been doing yard work through the afternoon Saturday, and didn’t see a man place a Walmart sack on his front porch.
But his home security system did, depicting a man in dark clothing carefully balancing a long pole in his hands, with plastic sacks on opposite ends of the pole.
Video footage shows the man setting down one of the sacks on Dwyer’s front porch, then walking calmly out of view of the camera.
The video’s time stamp was 1:41 p.m.
“What’s weird is I was out there blowing my leaves off the sidewalk at 1:39, and went back out there at 1:43 to water plants,” Dwyer said. “I was out there two minutes before and two minutes after, but I never saw the guy.”
Dwyer recalled spotting the sack, and thinking it odd that he hadn’t seen it before, but was otherwise too preoccupied with yard work to give it much thought.
“But when Anna got home from work, she asked about who put it there,” Dwyer said.
Anna Mussulman, Dwyer’s girlfriend, noted the sack had an open coffee can containing a styrofoam cup, complete with a lid and straw, as if it contained a fountain drink.
Before touching the cup, the pair scrolled through the video footage that showed the man dropping off the sack and then leaving.
“What’s crazy is he went around to the back and off into the woods,” Dwyer said. “He probably walked right past my home security signs and by my cars.”
Mussulman decided to investigate the package a little closer, using a pair of kitchen tongs, while Dwyer did a quick canvass of his property and nearby areas to ensure the man wasn’t still there. (He found nothing.)
“I just told her, ‘you better be careful. That might have a snake or something,’” Dwyer recalled. “We thought it might have been empty. But she was poking at it with the tongs and finally got it opened.”
The styrofoam cup contained a live copperhead, roughly 18 inches in length, coiled up at the bottom.
