Despite never laying eyes on her attacker, a Florida teen recalls the “feeling” of the grisly beast that claimed her right leg.
At 17, Addison Bethea was suddenly attacked by what she believes was a 10-foot bull shark while scalloping off the coast of Florida near Keaton Beach one year ago.
She was unexpectedly dragged beneath the surface of the shallow waters, fear washing over her upon realizing it was not her brother, Rhett, playing a prank. She saw the blood and the thrashing tail as the shark chomped down on her right calf, followed by her thigh.
“When you try to scream and nothing comes out – that’s what I felt like,” Addison, now 18, told The Guardian. “So I belted as loud as I could, so someone heard and I didn’t just die in the water.”
Now, one year after the life-altering attack, Bethea has returned to the beach with her brother Rhett and boyfriend Ashton to the spot where she was attacked. And she has no plans to stop swimming, scalloping and surfing, either.
“I’m not going to avoid that when it’s something I like to do,” she said.
Still, the haunting attack is fresh in her mind. “I remember feeling everything,” she said.
While she didn’t see the shark beneath the water, she remembers its sandpaper skin, “razor-sharp teeth” and “gooey” eyes, which she poked at during her escape.
“Its eyeball was the size of a baseball: very big, very gooey – very gross,” she said. “I remember even in the moment being, like, eww.”
She recalls estimating the shark’s size, saying her “whole arm couldn’t even wrap around its body,” guessing that the creature was a bull shark. The species poses a threat to humans in Florida, which was named the shark bite capitol of the world last year.
Despite Rhett’s best attempts to pry Addison free from its jaws, the shark latched on, and the teen fought back, remembering advice from the Discovery Channel, which suggested hitting the shark in the nose.
The shark would let go, but come right back during the attack, which only lasted about 20 seconds — long enough to lose her leg.
Eventually, she wriggled free and was hoisted onto a stranger’s boat, where she shocked her firefighter brother with what was left of her limb. The boat sped off towards the shore and she was loaded into a rescue helicopter and transported to a local hospital.
“When I was getting attacked, I was praying to God that I’d be OK,” she said. “Then, when I was in the boat, I was praying again … just to get me through it, or to get everyone else through it if I did pass [away]. That made me feel better.”
She believes higher powers heard her prayers — she arrived at the emergency department of a Tallahassee hospital just in time to undergo surgery that would save part of her leg. Had she not received medical care quickly enough, she would have needed to amputate at the hip, which would have placed her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Narrowly escaping the jaws of death, Addison faced a long road to recovery after her amputation, but pushed through rehabilitation in under two months — a miraculous and unusual feat — and eventually returned to school mere months later with her new prosthetic leg.
One year after the harrowing attack, Addison, who said she can “speed walk” again, returned to the same waters and dared to take a dip.
“What you have to realize is that once you get into the ocean, that is not your territory,” said Addison, who graduated high school and is expecting her first child in December. “The shark was following its instincts. Yeah, it sucks that it picked me to bite – but it happens.”
While experts claim shark attacks are mere accidents because they don’t actually want to eat humans, Addison doesn’t buy it.
“You hear that your whole life,” she said, “then you get attacked by one.”