Newly released body camera footage captured the moments when officers and rescue crews responded to a Florida Beach after a 9-year-old girl was bitten by a shark.
The incident happened on Wednesday as Leah Lendel was in the water in Boca Grande, near Fort Myers.
Family Photo, Getty Images
Family Photo, Getty Images Leah Lendel was injured in a shark attack in Florida.
Lendel was airlifted to a hospital for emergency surgery after her hand was partially severed by the attack.
Body camera footage showed rescue crews attending to Lendel after she was bitten.
“She’s doing good. Brave kid,” said an officer.
When an officer started to talk to Lendel’s mother, she said she and her other children were snorkeling near the shore and noticed her daughter was hurt after she came out of the water.
“And then she flies out and like I look over, I don’t know if I heard a yell or what, but she went that and I see her hand hanging, like a piece and there’s blood everywhere,” the mother said. “And I started screaming to my husband to hurry up and get out because I had so many babies, I didn’t know who to grab. I got the point, it’s a shark.”
The officer then spoke with three men who saw the incident and assisted.
“We were just sitting down, taking lunch and we start hearing like, ‘Help,’ so we jumped out of the water, we jumped out of the chair, he jumped on the water to take the shark out of his hands,” said one of the men.
The men wrapped Lendel’s hand in towels before she was airlifted to a hospital in Tampa.
All you can see is just the hand, the arm, hanging on the arm, so we put a towel on it, took her to the front, I called 911.”
The men described the shark as being around 8 feet long and near the shore.
The officer was seen in the body camera footage shaking the men’s hand and thanking them for their swift action.
Doctors were able to perform emergency surgery to reattach the partially severed hand.
“The doctors were able to do some miracles and put her hand back together,” her uncle, Max Derinsky told NBC News. “She will be in the hospital for a while and then a lot of physical therapy to hopefully get her hand functioning again.”
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