An 8-year-old Eastland County boy was airlifted to a Fort Worth hospital Thursday after a rattlesnake bit him at school.
Doctors are treating Edwin Gutierrez's life-threatening snakebite at Cook Children's Medical Center.
Edwin said he felt a sharp pain in his left hand when he reached into a supply cabinet at Seibert Elementary School.
"He heard the noise -- I guess the rattler on the snake -- and he thought they were crickets, but it was in the cabinet," said his mother, Karla Garcia.
Garcia said she passed out when the school told her that Edwin had been bitten by a rattlesnake.
The rural school has been battling a snake problem since the summer, but Edwin's mother said she had thought the situation was taken care of.
"I'm scared," she said. "I don't even know if I want to send him back to school. Everybody's really upset [at] how … nobody's done [anything]. They knew there were snakes, and yet they didn't do [anything]."
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Seibert's principal said professional wildlife removal experts would be on school grounds Saturday. They will inspect every building on campus to make sure it is safe for students to return to class on Monday.
NBC 5's Ellen Goldberg contributed to this report.
