Kentucky's Darwin Award Nominee

Too bad he had a chance to reproduce and pass along his stupid genes.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

Snake-handling preacher Jamie Coots, who never backed away from his beliefs despite derision, criminal charges and excruciating bites, died Saturday night after being bitten by a rattlesnake during a church service.
Family members of Coots, 42, refused medical treatment for him. He was pronounced dead about two hours after the rattler sank its fangs into his right hand.

His son said the poison overwhelmed his father within minutes of the bite.

"It was the quickest snakebite I ever seen in my life," Coots' son, Cody, said Sunday.

Jamie Coots' death appears to be the first from a snakebite in a Kentucky church service since November 2006, when a woman died after being bitten while worshipping at a Laurel County church.

Coots, a third-generation snake handler, was the pastor of a small church in Middlesboro, Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name.

He had long been prominent among the small, close-knit circle of snake-handling Pentecostal churches in Appalachia, but he gained wider notice last fall though a National Geographic Channel program called Snake Salvation, which profiled him and other snake handlers. The show was not renewed for a second season.

Read the whole long, freakazoid-excusing thing.