The pet's owner, a boyfriend of the child's mother, found the python on top of the 2-year-old girl in the rural community of Oxford, about 50 miles northwest of Orlando. The python apparently broke free in the night, entered the girl's bedroom and attacked her.

"This is very rare," Patricia Behnke of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission told reporters. The owner stabbed the snake when he found it on the child but she was dead when emergency crews arrived, the Orlando Sentinel newspaper said.