

Joseph Ricciardella, Torrington, Connecticut man nearly dies after bitten by rattlesnake after stopping to assist the reptile as it struggled to make its way along a busy road.
An ardent animal lover nearly lost his life after stopping his car to assist a rattlesnake trying to make its way across the middle of a busy road.
Joseph Ricciardella, 45, of Torrington, Connecticut was on his way back home after dropping his four-year-old daughter off with her mother in New York on Sunday when he came across a snake lying in the middle of the road.
Ricciardella, who has a soft spot for animals and as a young adolescent used to catch snakes with his brother, stopped his vehicle and grabbed a shirt from the backseat, placed it over the snake’s head and picked it up to move it, WFSB reported.
Lethal venom was beginning to take its toll
Unbeknownst to the Good Samaritan, the stranded snake was a venomous Timber rattlesnake, with the animal emitting a lethal venom upon biting Ricciardella in the hand.
He quickly called his former girlfriend who he shares a 4-year-old daughter with, Brittany Hilmeyer, but she thought he was just joking at first — until the venom started to affect his speech.
‘It sounded like he was almost trying to make a funny voice, like at first I thought he was messing with me,’ Brittany Hilmeyer said of her conversation with him afterwards.
‘He was getting to the point where he really couldn’t talk. You couldn’t understand him,’ Hilmeyer continued. ‘It was like trying to talk to someone with a mouth full of marbles.’
Hilmeyer did not know at the time, but the venom from the snake bite was affecting Ricciardella’s ability to breathe.
She added that she was not surprised when she later found out Ricciardella went out of his way to help the snake.
‘He’s had a bat in his house with a broken wing at one point that he was trying to fix,’ she recounted.
‘Last week, it was a baby bunny.’
Lack of anti-venom at hospital
Ricciardella, who owns a landscaping business, somehow was able to make it back to his car and drive himself to the nearest hospital – where doctors determined that his respiratory system was failing and going into cardiac arrest.
Due to a short supply of anti-venom at the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, Ricciardella had to be moved to Hartford Hospital in the state capital.
‘A lot of hospitals, I guess it’s not common to carry large amounts of anti-venom,’ Hilmeyer said.
‘So that was part of the problem when he went to the first hospital. The second hospital was having more flown in.’
The snake bite led to Ricciardella suffering a life-threatening allergic reaction that caused him to be placed in a medically induced coma, according to an online fundraiser set up to pay for his medical bills.
‘There have been improvements, but the medical bills are piling up and he has no insurance as he’s self-employed as a landscaper,’ the fundraiser says, noting that he has four children – three of whom are under the age of 16.
The dad has been making slow progress since the terrifying ordeal but remains in the hospital.
‘The doctor said he looks a little less swollen today,’ Hilmeyer told CT Insider on Tuesday.

What to do if one comes across a dangerous snake species?
Ricciardella is now expected to recover in the Intensive Care Unit for at least another week.
‘They’re waiting for the swelling to go down,’ Hilmeyer said. ‘Then he won’t be sedated so heavily anymore.
‘That’s when he’ll be able to talk.’
Growing up in Waterbury and upstate New York, Ricciardella and his brother Robert used to capture snakes as boys, the sibling told the newspaper.
According to the sibling, Joseph once let an injured bat that he found in his home stay there until it fully recovered.
Connecticut has two venomous snakes in the state: the timber rattlesnake and the copperhead, but they will only bite if they feel threatened or are handled, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection recommends that anyone who encounters either species, observe it from a distance and back away slowly.