The system version of libsqlite3 that is included in Mac OS X is not fork safe. This means that if a process forks, and the child calls into it, it will crash with the stack trace below. I've reproduced this with both Python 2.7.10 and Python 3.5.1 on Mac OS X 10.11.5. There are a number of reports about this issue on the Internet. The only way I can think to solve this problem is to bundle SQLite