A 9-year-old girl snorkeling off the coast of Florida nearly lost her hand when a shark bit her in a harrowing attack, her family said Thursday.
Little Leah Lendel was swimming with her family near Boca Grande around noon on Wednesday when a shark attacked her, biting deeply into her right hand and leaving it nearly severed at the wrist, as reported by Gulf Coast News.
While holding her two toddlers in floaties just four feet away, her mother shouted for assistance as Leah’s wound bled profusely, the family said in a statement.
“Someone was yelling, ‘Help, help, help!’” recalled Raynel Lugo, a worker nearby, to WINK News. “There were about five kids in the water, along with their mom and dad, and I saw a shark right on top of the woman and child.”
Lendel’s father, who was swimming farther away, rushed to help his daughter to shore and good Samaritans then wrapped her hand in a tourniquet.
“She was walking outside with [her] hand out bleeding, like really bad. So [a co-worker] put a towel on it to stop the bleeding. And I called 911,” Lugo said.
The youngster was quickly air-lifted to a hospital in Tampa, where she underwent a six-hour surgery, and doctors were able to save her hand.
Leah’s uncle, Max Derinskiy, said the girl will likely remain in the hospital for a while and then undergo “a lot of physical therapy to hopefully get her hand functioning again,” according to NBC News.
Derinskiy has since set up an online fundraiser to help the family with medical bills.The attack was likely from a bull shark because it’s both mating season and “tarpon season” — meaning there’s an abundance of fish that the sharks eat in the area, naturalist Rob HowellBull told WINK News.
Bull sharks generally grow to 7 to 11 feet in length.
