Newly released bodycam footage shows the harrowing moments after a shark nearly bit the hand off of a 9-year-old girl who was snorkeling off the coast of Florida.
Little Leah Lendel was in the water near Boca Grande with her parents and siblings at around noon Wednesday when the apex predator suddenly chomped down on her right hand — tearing it mostly off at the wrist, according to Gulf Coast News.
Police bodycam footage showed several medics crowding around the girl and reassuring her she was “very strong” and “brave” before taking her into an ambulance, according to the clip obtained by the outlet.
The footage also showed her mother, Nadia Lendel, in tears as she described the attack to cops.
“I looked over and I just saw her move her hand like that,” the mother said, throwing her hand up in the air. “I just saw her hand hanging, there was just blood everywhere.”
“I started screaming to my husband, yelling I needed to get out and grab the babies. Didn’t know who to grab. Got the point, it was a shark,” Nadia, who was holding her two other toddler kids in the water, said in the video.
Leah’s father, who was swimming farther away, rushed to help his daughter to shore and good Samaritans then wrapped her hand in a tourniquet.
“Somebody [was] screaming, ‘Help, help, help!” Raynel Lugo, a nearby worker, told WINK News. “It was like five kids on the water, mom and dad on the water, and I saw a shark right on top of the lady [and] little kid.”
“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 airlifted to a hospital in Tampa, where she underwent a six-hour surgery, and doctors were able to save her hand.
Nadia Lendel, a blogger with over 97,000 followers on Instagram, said Leah was able to move all of her fingers Friday morning.
“This is truly a MIRACLE,” the mom of five wrote, with a picture of her next to her daughter’s hospital bed.
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 Howell told WINK News.
Bull sharks generally grow to 7 to 11 feet in length.
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