Irvine Boy, 8, Tries to Pet Rattlesnake and Is Bitten

An 8-year-old Irvine boy tried to play with a baby rattlesnake and was bitten, then suffered through 24 hours of excruciating pain.

“I tried to pet it and it bit me,” Shane Vicker said Friday. “I wish I never touched it. It hurts.”

Shane was watching his big brother play football at University High School about 4:30 p.m. Thursday when the snake slithered through the grass toward a crowd of spectators.

He reached out to touch it and the rattler sank a fang into his left hand.

The boy, who spent Thursday night at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, went through “24 hours of unbelievable pain” from the bite and injections of an antidote to the venom, said his father, Bill Vickers.

“This has really been quite a frightening ordeal,” Vickers said.

The snake probably crawled onto the field from a nearby park, said Jerry Rayl, acting schools superintendent in Irvine.

It was captured after the attack so doctors could inspect it, then destroyed, said Debbie Fulbright, a city animal-services officer.

“Being bit by a baby rattlesnake is worse than being bit by an adult because babies don’t control the amount of venom they put out the way adults do,” she said. “A baby just goes for it.”

It was the first snakebite case in the city in about two years, Fulbright said.