Girl's hand was ‘mostly torn off' in shark attack

News.com.au

13 hours ago

A 10-year-old girl suffered serious injuries after being attacked by a shark while snorkelling at a popular holiday destination.
Leah Lendel was just one metre away from her influencer mother Nadia on Wednesday when she suddenly started screaming after emerging from underwater.
The shark had bitten the girl's right arm, with it mostly torn off at the wrist, Gulf Coast News reported.
Leah's father, who had been swimming at a distance, hurried to help her to the shore. Her hand was then wrapped in a tourniquet.
Newly released bodycam footage from the scene of the attack at Boca Grande in Florida shows medics rushing to help the girl, who was later taken away in an ambulance.
A distraught Nadia, a mum-of-five who has over 97,000 followers on Instagram, can be seen in the footage crying as she described the attack to police.
'I looked over and I just saw her move her hand like that,' Nadia said, as she put 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 said.
Witness Raynel Lugo, a nearby worker, told local news site WINK News: 'Somebody [was] screaming, 'Help, help, help!' It was like five kids on the water, mum 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 shark has been reported by witnesses as approximately 2.4 metres in length.
Leah has since undergone a six-hour surgery to save her hand and is able to move all of her fingers.
'This is truly a miracle,' Nadia wrote.
Nadia explained of the surgery: 'They had to get arteries from her leg to the hand. Got the blood flow back to her hand. Install pins in bones. Still has open tissues. They will be monitoring her here for a week. But thank God she can move her fingers.'
Leah's uncle Max Derinskiy, who created a GoFundMe campaign to help with medical expenses, told NBC News that the girl will be hospitalised for 'a while'.
She will then face 'a lot of physical therapy to hopefully get her hand functioning again'.
'The doctors worked miracles and were able to put her hand back together,' he said.
The hospital shared a statement from the Lendel family: 'We want to say thank you to everyone that is praying for our sweet Leah. We are thankful for the quick response of everyone that was on scene, the construction workers and residents that ran out to help and the first responders and to all the doctors/nurses that are doing everything to help our girl.'