A 13-year-old girl said she was bitten multiple times by a bull shark last week while sitting in the ocean with a friend near her home in South Florida.
Ella Reed had injuries to her abdomen, arms and legs that required stitches in a raid at Fort Pierce Inlet State Park in St. Lucie County.
Reid told WPTV that the attack occurred in shallow, breaking waves near the coast.
“It would have been really, really bad,” the girl told the media if the shark had bit harder, showing a stitched wound on her abdomen.
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Then she remembered the moment a shark, thought to be at least four feet long, swam past her friend and attacked her.
“It crawled under her and came straight towards me and grabbed my belly first and I tried to block it with my arm and hand and it kind of slipped and my fingers and grabbed my arm, and it swooped down and grabbed my leg, “again,” she said. “I didn’t have much pain in the first part because the adrenaline was pumping.”
“I was so shocked,” said Reed, who immediately jumped out of the water and hurried home to inform her mother.
“At first, I really thought it was a prank,” said Devin Reid, the boy’s mother.
Her parents realized it wasn’t a prank and took her to the St. Lucie County Fire Department. From there her firefighters rushed her to her hospital.
Devin said her family has lived in the North Hutchinson Island community for more than 20 years and never worried about shark attacks.
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“It’s pretty scary, but thankfully [Ella’s] So when I’m talking to you and you know, ‘Okay, she’s fine,’ it calms me down a bit,” Devin said, adding that the whole experience was “surreal.”
Ella said the attack was scary, but said once the stitches were removed there was no escape from the water. She also said she had a newfound respect for the ocean and its inhabitants.