HUNTINGTON BEACH : Owner Wants Back 12 Feet of Python

Someone snatched Scott Stewart’s prized pet Burmese python. And now he’s hissing mad.

Boot, who is 12 feet long and weighs about 75 pounds, mysteriously disappeared from Stewart’s 6th Street apartment Thursday night. Some burglar apparently slithered unnoticed into the apartment and scooped up the exotic reptile, cage and all, police said.

“Yeah, he’s gone,” lamented Stewart, 21, on Friday morning about his pet which he has owned for eight years. “Somebody took him.”

Stewart said that at 8:30 p.m., he left his apartment to run some errands. His snake was sleeping soundly in the bedroom, coiled up in his cage.

When Stewart returned about 9:15 p.m., he did not notice anything out of the ordinary, so he settled onto his living room couch and leisurely smoked a cigarette.

“When I finally went into my bedroom, it wasn’t there,” he said.

“I wasn’t even gone long,” he added.

Stewart then noticed that a sliding glass door to his apartment had apparently been forced open. A wedge that he uses to secure the door was missing and the door was slightly off its track.

Oddly, Stewart said, nothing else was taken from his apartment. The burglar apparently just wanted Boot, who is worth up to $400 on the reptile market.

“That’s what is so weird about it,” Stewart said. “They didn’t touch anything else.”

Just about everybody in the neighborhood knew the snake lived in the apartment, he said. Boot, who has large brown splotches across his scaly body and scars near his head, is a neighborhood conversation piece.

“A lot of people see him,” Stewart said. “I take him out to the front lawn once or twice a week. Sometimes they are scared. But Boot is really mellow.”

Stewart said that he has already telephoned several pet shops, in case the snake snatcher has tried to make a profit off Boot. “They could sell him easily,” Stewart said. “Then I can get him back.”