The snake-handling pastor starring on the reality show "Snake Salvation," died from a snake bite Saturday, according to Middlesboro police. 
 
 Police believe Jamie Coots died after a rattlesnake bit his right hand during a church service. 
 
 Coots was found dead in his home about 10 p.m. after refusing medical treatment, according to police. 
 
 Cody Coots says he remembers every detail leading up to the moment when his father was bitten. 
 
 “Everybody was getting in, shouting, taking up serpents, speaking in tongues, handling fire. I mean, you could just feel the power of God,” Cody Coots said. 
 
 Coots says that his father knew snake-handling could kill him, but he believed that if he was bitten either God would save him or he would die. 
 
 “If he had lived and woke up in a hospital bed, he would’ve blamed every one of us. He was a firm believer, he would not go to a hospital. He always told us, you get bit, you either die at home or God brings you through,” he said. 
 
 He says his father survived eight other snake bites. He also says they handled the snake that bit his father hundreds of times in the past four months. 
 
 Coots was well-known for his starring role on National Geographic's show "Snake Salvation." The reality show highlighted the snake-handling practice at his church in Bell County. 
 
 WKYT spoke to Coots about a year ago, after he was stopped in Tennessee where police found several rattlesnakes and copperheads in his car. 
 
 Coots said he believed the venomous snakes couldn't hurt him as long as he had the power of God. 
 
 "We use them in religious ceremonies and I believe as for me, if I don't have them there to use I'm not obeying the word of God," Jamie Coots said. 
 
 In an interview in 2012, Coots said he knew snake-handling might eventually kill him but he said it was how he preferred to go. 
 
 “I don’t actually want to die of a serpent bite, but I’d rather die and leave these walks of life with a serpent bite knowing there are people standing around me praying than to be in a car wreck and people standing around me cussing,” he said. 
 
 His son says he knows their churches’ controversial snake-handling practice may be hard for people to understand. 
 
 “It’s kind of like a family tradition. If you’ve not been raised up in this, you’re not going to understand it,” Cody Coots said. 
 
 Jamie Coots said he was a third-generation snake handler and hoped to pass the church on to his son. 
 
 Pastor Coots’ funeral will be at Creech Funeral Home on Tuesday. 
 
 Visitation is at 5 p.m. and the funeral is at 8 p.m. The interment will be private. ||||| A pentecostal preacher in Kentucky who died after being bitten by a rattlesnake is being hailed as a martyr by his colleagues, who will continue breaking the law by handling poisonous reptiles during their church services, according to friends. 
 
 Jamie Coots “lived and died consistent with his faith” and his death will only inspire more people to obey an instruction from God in the Gospel of Mark that “they shall take up serpents,” said Professor Ralph Hood, of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. 
 
 “This won’t stop them: just the opposite,” said Hood, a friend of Coots and the most noted expert on the Appalachian serpent-handling tradition. “They will continue, and praise Jamie Coots as a martyr who died for his faith.” 
 
 Coots died on Saturday night after being bitten on the right hand during a service at his Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church. The 42-year-old, who featured prominently in the National Geographic series Snake Salvation, refused medical attention on religious grounds. 
 
 His funeral is due to be held in his hometown of Middlesboro on Tuesday evening. 
 
 Coots’s son, Cody, said his family had expected him to survive because he had been bitten eight times before. “Everybody was getting in, shouting, taking up serpents, speaking in tongues, handling fire,” he told Kentucky’s WKYT-TV. “You could just feel the power of God.” 
 
 Coots had continued flouting a 74-year-old Kentucky law banning the use of poisonous snakes in religious services, even after a woman died from a bite during a ceremony he conducted in 1995. Coots was charged, but avoided prosecution after a judge declined to proceed with the case. He was also fined $6,400 in 2008 after being convicted of illegally trading in poisonous snakes. 
 
 Andrew Hamblin, a pastor in neighbouring Tennessee who was mentored by Coots and co-starred with him in the National Geographic series, is understood to have been devastated by the death. The Guardian has been told that he intends to continue his snake-handling services at Tabernacle Church of God. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man handling a rattlesnake during services at the Church of the Lord Jesus in Kingston, Georgia, in 1995. Photograph: John Bazemore/AP 
 
 Hamblin, 23, was last year charged with illegally possessing poisonous reptiles and had 53 rattlesnakes, copperheads and other breeds seized from his church. However, charges were dropped last month when a grand jury voted not to indict him. Hamblin claims the snakes’ appearances are shows of divine power. 
 
 
 
 In an interview before Coots’s death, Hamblin told the Guardian he disagreed with colleagues who declined medical help when bitten. “God has not moved on you, that authority is not there to protect you,” he said. “So go see a doctor. Do not sit there and suffer.” 
 
 Hamblin, a father of five young children, suffered his first bite while helping Coots prepare for a service in July 2010. “I was knocking on death’s door,” he said. “Me and death was just about ready to smoke a cigarette together, but God had mercy on me through a doctor’s knowledge.” 
 
 Since suffering the bite, he has been unable to make a fist with his right hand. He said he suffered another bite to his neck the next month but escaped without injury. However he insisted he had no fear when compelled by a command from God to pick up a snake during his services. 
 
 “If it’s my point in time to die, I could leave tonight in a car wreck and leave my children fatherless,” he said. “I could die of a heart attack. But if it’s my time to die there will not be a doctor in this world standing over me who’ll be able to keep me here”. 
 
 The tradition extends to West Virginia and dates back more than 100 years. Most pastors remain secretive about their work and do not permit outsiders to their services. Several declined to return requests for comment on Coots’s death. “If it’s about religion, I don’t want to talk about it,” said Pastor Jimmy Morrow of Newport, Tennessee. 
 
 They claim that only about 10 pastors have died from bites over the past century. However Mack Wolford of West Virginia, who led one of the best-attended snake-handling churches out of an estimated 125 in the region, was killed by a timber rattlesnake in May 2012. 
 
 “To the outsider it seems strange, but they have long accepted that they have a ritual that could kill,” said Hood. “For them it’s not a question of whether you are going to die, it’s a question of how you die. 
 
 “They would argue that the most important thing is to die being obedient to god. So they can mourn the loss of a loved one from a serpent bite, but simultaneously be confident that they are in heaven. It’s kind of a win-win situation, as far as they see it.”
– If your reaction to the death of the snake-handling Kentucky pastor killed by one of his own snakes on Saturday was "he must have been delusional," WBIR digs into why the exact opposite is, in one way, the case. It spoke with a range of religion professors about Pastor Jamie Coots' death, and the consensus is clear: Coots had no illusions about the risks or potential consequences; snake handlers do not believe they will not be bitten, and know death is a possibility. As Maryville College religion professor Dr. Brian Pennington explains, "These are not irrational people. They know very well the fate that Pastor Coots suffered could be suffered by any of them who does this during a service." In fact, the man who originated the practice in Tennessee a century ago, Pastor George Hensley, himself died of a snakebite. It's one of 92 deaths attributed to snakebites during worships as counted by one study, and experts says Coots' death will do little to cool worshipers to the practice, which is illegal in Tennessee and Kentucky. Quite the opposite, "They will continue, and praise Jamie Coots as a martyr who died for his faith," says University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Professor Ralph Hood, per the Guardian. Still, Coots' son, Cody, did tell WKYT he expected his father to survive the bite—as he had on eight previous occasions.