A New Jersey couple returning home from a wheel alignment found an unexpected passenger wedged in their vehicle — a 3-foot ball python coiled inside the car’s grille, according to ABC7. The Sept. 14 discovery on Oakland Avenue in Franklin Township set off a roughly 20-minute rescue effort that ended with local police, rather than animal control, doing the extraction.
Aiyana Hudson, who owns the car, told ABC7 she started panicking the moment she spotted the snake. Her boyfriend, she said, was less rattled.
“He told me, ‘Stop — you’re acting like someone died,’ and I was like, ‘It’s a snake,’ and he’s like, ‘Let’s go look at this,'” Hudson recalled.
Looking closer didn’t solve the more practical problem: the couple had no idea who to call. They initially tried animal control, which turned them away. Domestic animals only, they were told. That left the police as a fallback.
“We tried getting animal control out there, and they’re like, they only deal with domesticated animals. And we’re like, oh shoot. OK. So, we’re kind of like the last resort,” Officer Lisseth Villacis told ABC7.
Body Camera Footage Shows the Extraction
Body camera video of the encounter shows officers circling the car, peering into the grille and working out how to safely get the reptile free. The Franklin Township Police Department confirmed that its officers also tried to bring in animal control support and came up empty.
What followed was an improvised operation. Villacis described a mutual pep talk between the officers on scene.
“We were just like, ‘OK, he’s being brave. I’m being brave. We got this. Let’s just try to take it out,'” she said.
The full effort took about 20 minutes before officers managed to pull the python loose. It was later identified as a ball python measuring 3 feet in length. Ball pythons are a popular species in the pet trade and are non-venomous, though that distinction tends to matter less when one is discovered inside the bodywork of your vehicle.
How It Got There Remains a Mystery
No one involved has been able to say how the snake ended up in the grille. The couple’s car had just been in for a wheel alignment — a detail that invites speculation about where the animal might have been picked up, but investigators have offered no explanation, and the report provides none.
The python was taken to an animal shelter and is expected to be put up for adoption, according to ABC7. That outcome stands in contrast to the fate that often awaits exotic pets found loose in suburban settings, where they are frequently euthanized or left unclaimed. In this case, the snake’s survival appears to have owed something to the fact that officers treated the call as a rescue rather than a nuisance complaint.
For Hudson, the relief was considerable — and specifically located. She told ABC7 she was grateful the snake hadn’t made a more dramatic entrance while she was behind the wheel.
“I was just really happy that it didn’t, like, pop its head through the AC vent when I was driving or come in through the steering wheel,” she said. “I want to let you know my car would have been lit on fire, and we’d be calling the fire department at that point.”
Franklin Township police have not said whether the snake’s owner has been located or whether anyone has come forward to claim it. Calls of this kind are unusual for municipal police departments, which are not typically trained or equipped to handle reptile removal. That the Franklin Township officers managed it in about the time it takes to write up a routine traffic stop is, by the standards of a wheel-alignment appointment gone sideways, a reasonably tidy ending.
The department’s body camera footage of the removal has since circulated online, drawing attention to a call that Villacis and her colleagues appear to have treated with more humor than alarm.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/pre-viral/2026/09/23/watch-new-jersey-police-remove-ball-python-hiding-in-womans-car-grille/