Pet Cobra Escapes, Costs Teenage Owner $134K

A 19-year-old German boy is facing a huge repair bill after authorities tore apart his apartment building looking for his poisonous pet snake. Authorities evacuated the building, stripped the boy’s apartment bare, and ripped out the walls and floorboards hunting for the foot-long monocled cobra, which escaped on March 18, the BBC reports. Three weeks later, they found it dead on a sticky trap they’d laid down.

“Everything has had a happy end,” a town spokesman said. “Not for the snake, but for us.” And not, of course, for the snake’s owner. Though his neighbors have been allowed back into the building, his apartment is uninhabitable—and he’s being billed for the roughly $134,000 in damage to it. (More snake stories.)