Florida Teen Has Leg Amputated After "Devastating" Shark Attack

Meghan Overdeep - 6 July 2022

A teenage girl was scalloping in the waters off Keaton Beach, Florida, with her family on Thursday when a nine-foot shark latched onto her right leg.

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"I didn't really know exactly what to do, but I knew that with sharks you're supposed to punch them in the nose to get them off of you, and I couldn't get around to punch him in the nose," Addison Bethea, 17, told CNN from her bed at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH) on Monday. "So I just started socking it in the face and then poked its eyes and I tried to latch it off me with my fingers, and then it bit my hand."

Bethea's brother Rhett Willingham, a firefighter/EMT, said he heard his sister "make a noise almost like something scared her."

"I sat up and looked and didn't see her," he recalled to CNN. "Then she came up from the water and I saw the shark and the blood and all that, then I swam over there and got (the shark) off."

After fighting off the shark in approximately five feet of water, Willingham pulled his sister into a boat. He applied a tourniquet to her leg before rushing her back to land.

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Poster Comment:

Shit happens.