East Texas

BY PHILLIP WILLIAMS
Special Correspondent

HAWKINS — A Gilmer ISD kindergarten teacher was listed in good condition Friday at a Tyler hospital after a copperhead snake bit her twice outside her home at Holly Lake Ranch near Hawkins on Wednesday night.

Julie York, a teacher at Gilmer Elementary School, said Friday she would be held at East Texas Medical Center over the weekend, mainly for observation.

In a telephone interview with the Tyler Paper, Mrs. York said the snake bit her right ankle and right index finger as she was going from her car to her home about 10 p.m.

She said her yard only had landscape lighting, and that her two sons walked by the snake before “I felt like a stab by my ankle.” Thinking someone had dropped something, she reached down to feel for it, and the reptile bit her finger, she said.

Mrs. York’s husband, Steve York — the athletic trainer and a coach at Gilmer High School — came out of the house and killed the snake with a golf club. The reptile, which Holly Lake Ranch security confirmed was a copperhead, was an estimated 2 1/2 to 3 feet long, she said.

Mrs. York said the second wound felt like a balloon with fire in it “trying to expand inside my finger,” due to the swelling and poison. She was admitted to the ETMC-Gilmer hospital before being transferred by ambulance to the Tyler hospital Thursday morning, she said.

Holly Lake Ranch spokesman Aubrey Maddux said Friday this was the “first poisonous snake bite that I’ve heard of” at the sprawling rural housing development in more than 20 years of working there.