SOUTH WALTON BEACH, Florida – On a bright blue day at the end of May, Andrew Cady dropped his Sea-Doos into Lake Powell in the Florida panhandle, and he and his two daughters gunned them toward the ocean.
The lake is separated from the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow strip of brilliant white sand called Inlet Beach. Cady and his daughters, 11 and 16, were locals from nearby Watersound and knew how to pick their way out of the lake past the beaches filled with vacationers.
Three months earlier, a team with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had dredged open the silted-up inlet, allowing a stream of fresh lake water, along with its fish and marine life, to pour through the barrier island and into the Gulf.
As the two watercraft idled through the pass, Cady had a bird’s-eye view of the white sand on either side of them and the blue-green water that surged below. Then, a dark shadow raced past.
As one of his daughters filmed the scene with a camera from one of the skis, Cady looked at the families splashing along the sand on either side and began shouting.
“Shark!” he yelled. “Out of the water!”
The video shows the dark figure racing along the shore, so fast it looks more like flying than swimming.
A man carrying a young girl stumbled onto the beach as the shark darted toward him, making it out of the water just in time. Then the dark shadow wove between the two Sea-Doos and along the sand.
Cady and his daughters watched as the dagger-shaped shadow disappeared. He wouldn’t post the video to Facebook until two weeks later, when his hometown was suddenly a national headline.
On June 7, another day’s blue sky stretched across the beaches that skirt the stretch of Florida coast known locally as “30A,” for the county highway that backs the dunes. Scores of sunbathers splayed on towels or under beach tents.
Watersound Beach, a few miles west of the Lake Powell inlet, is a private stretch accessible only to one nearby community. That day, the two sandbars off its shore, at 30 and 60 yards out, were dotted with bodysurfers and swimmers.
Among them were Elisabeth Foley, 50, on vacation from Virginia with her husband, Ryan, and their three children, Dominick, 13, Lyla, 15 and Laurel, 17, who splashed happily in the shallow waters of the first sandbar.
Keith Harrison, 53, a neuropathologist visiting with his family from Birmingham, Ala., was also at the first sandbar with his two sons, ages 9 and 12, bodysurfing the short waves. They were at the tail end of a weeklong family trip, and for the first few days the water at Watersound had been a little murky. But on Friday, it was crystalline, and they planned to enjoy it.
Then, screams.
Harrison at first thought they were from kids playing. But as he turned toward the commotion, he saw a plume of blood spreading in the water. He left his kids to his wife and ran toward it. As he arrived, he saw Elisabeth Foley emerging from the water – half of her left forearm and her hand were missing. Flesh from her buttocks hung in ribbons and blood poured from her pelvis. Her three children wailed around her. Her husband, Ryan, held her up.
Just behind them, Harrison saw a shadowy figure lurking in the water, keeping strangely still in the crimson-tinged tide. Another witness, an avid diver in the region, identified it as a bull shark.
Harrison grabbed Elisabeth from her husband and carried her toward shore, as Ryan wrangled the kids. As he clamped his hand around Elisabeth’s left brachial artery – the vessel that supplies blood to the arm – he took in the scene. A word sprang into his mind: “horrific.”
Rylee Smith, Bailey Massa and Abby Juedemann had spent all morning at Watersound Beach, swimming and sunbathing. The three of them, plus a fourth friend, had driven all night from Columbia, Missouri, for a girls’ beach weekend.
All were friends from their medical jobs – Smith, 22, was a paramedic; Massa, 23, an emergency room nurse; Juedemann, 22, was a nurse for a medical specialist. Earlier that day, they had picked up mahi mahi sandwiches for lunch. Under their beach tent, they marveled at how blue the sky and water were.
The screams jolted them out of their Friday laze.
Smith looked out at the water and saw it turn red. Shark attack, she thought instantly. Her paramedic instincts surging, she jumped out of her beach chair.
“You guys ready?” Smith asked her friends.
“For what?” one of them replied.
She flung off her sunhat, grabbed a towel and ran toward the shoreline. Her friends followed close behind.
In the water, the two men neared the sand. Elisabeth was in their arms, and she was dying.
More people, more sharks
Shark attacks remain a statistical rarity.
For the more than 7 billion people in the world – about half of whom live within about 100 miles of the ocean – the number of shark attacks is vanishingly small: about 60 bites and an average of six fatalities per year. You’re more likely to die from a lightning strike than suffer a serious shark attack.
Still, Florida leads the world in shark attacks. The state, with more than 8,000 miles of coastline, saw 16 unprovoked attacks last year — putting it higher than California (2), Hawaii (8) and all of Australia (15), according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
The sheer number of people wading into Florida waters – the state welcomed 140 million visitors last year, with about 40% of them hitting the beach – also helps make attacks more likely in the state. The east coast, from Miami to St. Augustine, has the denser coastal populations and sees the majority of Florida’s shark attacks.
Few moments etched the idea of shark attacks into the American experience more than the 1975 blockbuster movie “Jaws.”
Though the hit movie focused on great white sharks, it helped spur an interest in human pursuit of sharks of all varieties, said Cassidy Peterson, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, who has studied shark population trends.
“That actually had a big impact on recreational shark fishing,” she said.
Global trade relations, though, had perhaps the bigger impact.
In 1979, after the U.S. and China normalized trade relations, Peterson said, American fisheries rushed to harvest sharks for fins and other parts served as delicacies in China.
As shark populations plummeted, the federal government stepped in. Starting in 1993, a series of management plans and regulations by NOAA helped the populations rebound, Peterson said.
Dean Grubbs, director of Florida State University’s Coastal & Marine Laboratory, has conducted surveys of coastal sharks in the Gulf of Mexico for more than a decade and seen NOAA’s management efforts help shark populations slowly return to pre-1970s levels.
“You now have relatively healthy shark populations in the U.S.,” Grubbs said, whose teams survey sharks from Apalachicola Bay on the Florida panhandle to Tampa.
Marine life is not the only population surging along the Florida coast.
The number of yearly visitors to the state was 82 million in 2010. Last year, that number nearly doubled, according to the state tourism agency. And the percentage of visitors spending time at the beach or waterfront doubled in that time, from 20% in 2010 to nearly 40% – or 56 million people – last year.
The results seem inevitable, said Gavin Naylor, who directs the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History and oversees the International Shark Attack File.
“As you have more and more people using those areas for recreation,” he said, “then, absolutely, we can expect there’s going to be more interactions between people and sharks.”
The two populations live separately – one in the ocean, the other on land – until that moment they interact. And usually, that moment happens along a line of sparkling white sand, like the one along 30A.
On June 7, those panhandle beaches were full of people, families like Elisabeth Foley’s. Even as the people around her struggled to pull her from the water, other swimmers just down the coast waded into the water, unaware of what was coming.
‘She is losing blood fast’
Harrison, the specialist doctor, and Elisabeth’s husband carried her to shore and set her down on the sand. There, Harrison met Smith, the paramedic, Massa, the nurse, and another man who identified himself as a Navy SEAL. Smith dropped to her right side and pushed a towel on her mauled pelvic area. She closed her hands into fists and pushed down with all her might on the crevice where Elisabeth’s right leg met her waist, leaning on the severed femoral artery to try to stanch the bleeding.
Massa called 911 and relayed details of the injuries. The sailor put pressure on the other femoral artery, while Harrison’s sister-in-law, Amy Jones, wrapped what was left of Elisabeth’s left arm in a towel. Juedemann tried to keep Elisabeth awake. Ryan, her husband, knelt at her side, telling her how he loved her and praying with her.
Harrison continued squeezing down on the brachial artery in the arm, trying to control the bleeding. He tried to tourniquet the arm at the armpit, first with a wet towel then a Croakies sunglass strap. Nothing worked. He continued pressing the brachial artery against the humerus bone in her upper arm. The bleeding slowed but the towels became saturated with blood. All around them, people, including Elisabeth’s children, screamed.
Phone calls poured into the county’s emergency call center. A log of those calls captures the chaos of the scene:
13:21:26: SHARK ATTACK
13:22:07: SCREAMING IN BACKGROUND
13:23:07: HAND MISSING
13:23:13: PEOPLE ARE YELLING
13:29:01: SHE IS LOSING BLOOD FAST
“Everyone was focused on what was in front of them,” Harrison recalled later. “But it was utter chaos.”
Alyssa Huffman was in waist-deep water with her sister and 14-year-old nephew when they heard the screams. She raced toward the shoreline and toward Elisabeth. Huffman, 44, founder and chief executive of a spine and orthopedic implant company in Springfield, Missouri, grew up vacationing on the same stretch of coast and had trained as a lifeguard. She knew the beaches well.
Huffman ran toward the screams and was immediately struck by how ashen Elisabeth was. Her skin had drained of nearly all its color and her lips were white. She was still conscious but losing a lot of blood and dangerously close to slipping into shock. Huffman dropped next to her and cradled her head in her hands.
She asked Elisabeth if she wanted to pray. Elisabeth nodded. The two recited the Serenity Prayer: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Each time she noticed Elisabeth nodding off, Huffman rubbed sand on her cheek to keep her awake.
“Your children are here watching,” she told Elisabeth. “I need you to remember what it was like the last five minutes of delivery, remember how miserable that was. This is your marathon … This is going to go on for a while. The one thing you can do to show your kids how strong you are is breathe.”
Huffman led Elisabeth through a series of breathing exercises: four seconds in, four seconds out. Slow, steady.
“You have to be strong and you have to breathe,” she told Elisabeth. “And we’re going to pray together.”
‘Where’s the cavalry?’
Jacob Cherry was at the community swimming pool on the other side of the dunes when his mother-in-law called. There was some commotion on the beach, perhaps a medical emergency.
Cherry, a certified registered nurse anesthetist also from Springfield, Missouri, figured it was someone fainting from the heat. Still, he headed down to the beach to see if he could help.
It was a quarter-mile jog on the boardwalk over beach dunes, then down a flight of steps, then another 100 yards on the sand to reach the scene.
Though he was barefoot, as he got nearer, his jog grew to a sprint.
Cherry edged his way through the crowd and knelt next to Elisabeth and took over duties of leaning on one of the severed femoral arteries. He adjusted the towel on Elisabeth’s left arm and for the first time saw that it had been bitten clean off.
“That’s when it hit me,” he said. “This is like a movie. This is a real, real situation.”
At 1:30 p.m., nine minutes after the initial 911 call was placed, Walton County Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Webster arrived at the scene carrying two bags of medical supplies.
On Webster’s bodycam video, he’s seen handing a tourniquet to the team working on Elisabeth and asking about the extent of her injuries. Smith cuffed the tourniquet high on Elisabeth’s left arm, just under the armpit, and ratcheted it tight with the attached stick. Massa noted the time – 1:32 p.m. – a common practice when applying tourniquets; leaving it on too long could cause irreversible damage.
Amid the crowd on the beach, as trained volunteers mixed with stunned bystanders, the energy intensified. At one point, Webster barked, “Forget about gauze and all of that. Just put that tourniquet on as hard as you can!”
One of the volunteers already working on Elisabeth barked back: “Every single person here is medical!”
Smith dug into Webster’s bag and pulled out a roll of bandage, which she used to wrap the end of Elisabeth’s severed arm. They asked for an IV to replenish Elisabeth’s blood loss, but Webster didn’t have one.
As he applied pressure to the femoral artery, Cherry wondered if a medivac helicopter would land on the beach to ferry Elisabeth away. Instead, at 1:34 p.m. – 13 minutes from the initial 911 call – two emergency medical technicians arrived in a white South Walton Fire District pickup truck. They also didn’t have an IV.
“Where’s the cavalry?” Cherry asked.
The emergency responders looked at one another. “There is no cavalry,” one of them said. “This is it.”
Cherry was told a helicopter couldn’t land on the beach. It dawned on him that they would somehow have to carry Elisabeth across the boardwalk, back the same way he had come.
“It baffled me how long it took EMS,” Massa would later recall. “And then, when they showed up, how little supplies they had and how little prepared they were for the injuries that occurred.”
The team lowered a flexible stretcher and, together with the medical bystanders, rolled Elisabeth onto it. Then, as Cherry and others maintained pressure on the femoral arteries, they lifted her up and placed her in the bed of the pickup. They drove the 100 yards to the boardwalk, then removed her, carried her up the steps and down the boardwalk – trotting about a quarter mile, hauling a grown woman who was near death. Cherry, Smith, Massa and others seared their bare feet on the walkway’s hot wood.
At a boardwalk entrance, they commandeered a golf cart and ferried Elisabeth to a waiting ambulance.
She was rushed to a nearby fire station and later airlifted to Destin, Florida. Total time from when the first call came in to when the medivac helicopter landed: 39 minutes, according to log records.
To the bystanders who tried to save Elisabeth Foley’s life, it felt like an eternity.
No double red flags
The South Walton Fire District oversees 15 lifeguard towers to monitor its 26 miles of beaches. It uses a four-flag warning system, raised at different beach access points to warn beachgoers of any dangers in the Gulf: a purple flag depicts “Dangerous Marine Life,” usually abundant jellyfish or stingrays; a yellow flag is “Medium Hazard,” the county’s lowest risk; a single red flag means “High Surf and/or Strong Conditions,” and swimmers are urged to use caution but could still swim; and a double red flag means the water is closed to the public.
The flags are mostly used to describe surf conditions and rip currents but can be used to close the beach in an emergency.
For most of the day on June 7, the flags had flown yellow, reflecting the Gulf’s calm surf and good conditions, and purple, indicating possible jellyfish or stingrays in the water.
As Elisabeth was being carried to the ambulance, South Walton Fire District Beach Safety Director David Vaughan was making phone calls to county officials, including Walton County Sheriff’s Capt. Scott Hogeboom, to determine how and when to change the flags.
During the discussions, Hogeboom called Sheriff Mike Adkinson to fill him in on the incident.
“Hey, let’s close it all,” Adkinson says he told Hogeboom, referring to closing all 26 miles of county beaches. But he also deferred to the beach team’s thinking, calling it a “scientific decision.”
County incident reports show Vaughn and Hogeboom chose to follow protocols laid out by the United States Lifeguard Association and their own county guidelines for what to do in the event of a severe shark attack and close beaches only in the general vicinity of the attack.
At 1:38 p.m., Vaughan and Hogeboom agreed to “maintain localized area closure,” according to the reports.
It’s not clear what stretch of beach was immediately considered to be closed, though Adkinson said he believed they intended to close five miles in either direction from the attack. South Walton Fire District Chief Ryan Crawford declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to specific questions from USA TODAY about the incidents.
Vaughan called other county officials, including the sheriff’s public information officer and the Walton County tourism director, to alert them of the decision.
For much of South Walton’s coastline, yellow flags flew in place.
Sightings mount
For the people who live and work on the panhandle beaches known as the Emerald Coast, the rising shark population is not an esoteric figure.
Judah Barbee, who has captained a 52-foot charter fishing boat out of Destin since 2005, ferries families out into the Gulf to fish for snapper, mackerel and, occasionally, sharks. When he first started, he could troll for hours without getting a shark to bite, he said.
Starting a few years ago, he began seeing more sharks, including a lot of bull sharks, Barbee said. His charters began catching around 20 a year. In recent months, Barbee said, it’s hard to pull up a fish without a shark taking a chunk out of it.
This summer alone, his customers have caught more than 50 bull sharks, he said.
“There’s definitely a lot more of them right now for some reason,” Barbee said.
Yet encounters with sharks remain a statistically low probability, said Demian Chapman, director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota.
Unlike crocodiles, who have evolved to attack and eat primates, sharks have not, he said. If they were inclined to bite humans, he noted, “they would have millions of opportunities per day to do it.”
Shark bites are so statistically rare that there is not enough data to comprise meaningful strategies for prevention, he said.
Still, communities elsewhere are taking steps. For more than a decade, researchers at the nonprofit Atlantic White Shark Conservancy in Massachusetts have been attaching sensors to sharks in the region and tracking them around Cape Cod using the Sharktivity app. The app shows where more than 300 tagged white sharks lurk on any given day and encourages users to report shark sightings – a sort of Waze for sharks.
In Padaro Beach, just outside of Los Angeles, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory (BOSL) are using drones and artificial intelligence to spot great white sharks off shore and alert nearby lifeguards and businesses.
Drones could be an equally effective tool for monitoring sharks off Florida’s coast, said Naylor, the Florida shark tracker.
Phil Asselin, 55, a Gulf Coast native, has been surfing the area around Panama City Beach for decades and runs a private Facebook surfing group, Emerald Coast Surfers. Sharks are a common sight, he said, when he surfs and paddleboards just offshore.
Once, a bull shark got tangled in his surfboard leash as he crashed on a wave. It just swam away. And a hammerhead once circled his paddleboard menacingly before swimming out to sea. Asselin said he’s never been attacked by a shark, nor has anyone he knows.
“This is an extremely healthy marine environment,” he said. “Pretty much every time we go out on the water, we see sharks out there, especially once summer starts. It’s something we’ve learned to live with.”
Second shark attack
Four miles east from where rescuers were rushing to help Elisabeth, Delanie Quinnelly led her soon-to-be sister-in-law’s bachelorette party up the boardwalk stairs at Seacrest Beach and into the dazzling beach day.
She and nine other women had arrived at Seacrest Beach the night before to celebrate the impending nuptials of Kylie Kulinski, her brother’s fiancée.
They had planned a busy weekend that included a pontoon trip to Crab Island, sunset beach dinner and a pajama party with board games. On June 7, they got a late start and arrived at the beach at around 1 p.m. Quinley and the rest of the party wore matching blue bathing suits; the bride-to-be wore white.
Quinnelly, 23, a maternity nurse at the University of South Alabama’s Children’s & Women’s Hospital in Mobile, Ala., had vacationed at that stretch of beach growing up and explained to the group the meaning of the yellow and purple flags flapping over the boardwalk. Yellow means relatively calm surf, she said, and purple means “marine life.”
“Like a shark?” one of the women asked.
Quinnelly laughed. More like jellyfish, she said. Maybe a stingray.
“I’ve never seen a shark out here,” she told them.
The beach was packed that day and so Quinnelly and the group waited for a spot to open up. As they waited, at around 1:20 p.m., a white South Walton Fire District pickup truck sped west along the beach toward Watersound, its lights flashing. Beyond the boardwalk, Quinnelly heard the sudden wail of sirens.
Likely a heart attack or someone caught in a rip current, she thought.
A spot opened up on the beach and the group settled in. They spent the next few hours splashing in the clear, waist-high surf or sunbathing.
Not far from where Quinnelly and her crew bathed, Lulu Gribbin, 15, her identical twin sister, Ellie, and other friends splashed in the surf. The sisters, a family friend, McCray Faust, 17, and other friends had traveled to Seacrest Beach from Mountain Brook, Ala., a Birmingham suburb, a few days earlier for a mother-daughters beach trip.
Earlier that day, Lulu and Ellie had ridden their bikes from their beach condo to Playa Bowls for açai mango bowls, then came out to the beach with the other girls, according to an online account posted by Ellie. There, they swam, collected sand dollars and hit around a volleyball. At just before 3 p.m., Lulu, Ellie and McCray went into the water, made friends with some boys and hunted for more sand dollars.
Suddenly, a shadow moved through the thigh-high water. “Shark!” one of the girls yelled.
Ellie and some of the others raced to the shore. Behind her, Lulu yelled, “Stay calm!” Then, screams punctured the air. Ellie, reaching shore, turned and saw blood spreading through the water. In the middle of the large cloud of blood stood her sister, screaming.
Steven Beene, 57, who was staying in nearby Inlet Beach, was in the water and heard the screaming. He made his way toward Lulu and pulled her away from the shark, according to an incident report. As others helped bring her to shore, Lulu was carried face down, arms outstretched, as if flying over the waves. Half of her left arm was missing.
The most threatening species
Of all the sharks swimming in the Gulf, bull sharks, experts and biologists said, are among the most threatening. Bull sharks are large, reaching up to 10 feet in length, with a short, blunted snout, from which they derive its name. Their upper jaws are lined with large, triangular, serrated teeth, used to pull and tear flesh from larger animals.
Apex predators, they eat smaller fish but also larger prey, such as dolphins, manatees and other sharks. When they clamp down on prey, bull sharks thrash their head and tear off chunks, much like a pit bull terrier, according to the nonprofit Shark Research Institute.
Unlike a blacktip shark, which eats smaller fish whole and would likely leave just small puncture wounds on a human, bull shark bites are typically much more severe, said Grubbs, the Florida State University expert.
“If it results in a loss of a limb or loss of life, most often it seems to be a bull shark,” he said.
Bull sharks display an aggressive, almost territorial behavior not commonly seen in other sharks. Grubbs said he’s pursued bull sharks in his boat, and they’ve turned and attacked the boat. He referred to it as their “personal space issue.”
“They have their personal space, and they don’t want you invading it,” he said. “And if you unknowingly do so, you might get bit.”
Bull sharks are unique among most sharks in that they’re euryhaline, or able to survive in both fresh and saltwater. Bull sharks have been fished out of Lake Nicaragua, a freshwater lake in Central America, and discovered deep in the Amazon River. In 1995, a fisherman caught a bull shark in the Mississippi River near Rush Island, Missouri – more than 700 miles from the Gulf.
This trait makes them unafraid to venture deep into river mouths and estuaries – and closer to shore – for food, said Stephen Kajiura, a biologist at Florida Atlantic University who studies shark migratory patterns.
“Bull sharks are notorious for going up into freshwater,” he said. “There, they have an opportunity to hunt where they don’t have competition from other sharks.”
Researchers at Texas A&M University-Galveston recently documented a fivefold increase in the number of baby bull sharks in Mobile Bay, Ala., and a similar spike in Texas estuaries.
From Pensacola to Apalachee Bay, the Florida panhandle is similarly studded with estuaries, inlets and bays that push fresh water out into the Gulf.
‘She’s going to bleed out’
Delanie Quinnelly, standing in chest-high Gulf water, not far from where Lulu and her friends were, heard the screams.
People ran out of the water in a panic, while others screamed or cried. Some vomited on the shoreline and at least one person fainted, she said.
Quinnelly’s mind raced to a course she had taken last year at Coastal Alabama Community College called “Stop the Bleed,” where the instructor had trained students in how to use tourniquets in emergency situations. She began yelling directions at the crowd, ordering bystanders to make room for the girl. The amount of blood in the water – it had spread to cover a space the size of a swimming pool – told her the next few minutes would be crucial.
“I need shirts! I need towels!” Quinnelly bellowed. “I need anything that you can tie around this girl!”
People began tossing T-shirts, towels, boogie board strings in her general direction. When Lulu finally got to the sand, Quinnelly saw where most of the blood was coming from: Her entire right thigh was gone down to her knee. Her femur glistened in the sunlight and blood gushed from a severed femoral artery.
“Oh my gosh,” Quinnelly thought. “She’s going to bleed out.”
Nearby, Mohammed Ali and Ryan Forbess had been standing in waist-deep water, helping their young kids ride boogie boards, when the screams blared.
Ali, 45, an interventional radiologist who lives in Jackson, Miss., and Forbess, 46, a family doctor from Orange Beach, Ala., have been friends for decades, dating back to when they were med-school graduates and roommates in Hawaii. They vacationed together, alternating between Florida beaches and Tennessee mountains.
Ali and Forbess carried their kids out of the water, then hurried over to where Lulu was being brought ashore. Ali – a hulking figure at 6-feet, 2-inches and 280 pounds who enjoys spending time in the gym – knelt next to Lulu and leaned his weight on her femoral artery, cinching it closed. A bystander handed him a ratchet strap used to hold beach chairs together and he wrapped it tight around Lulu’s upper leg, leaning back in the sand and using all his weight to clamp down on the artery.
Other bystanders ran up, offering to help: an ER nurse, an emergency medical technician, an anesthesiologist.
Forbess checked Lulu’s pulse and listened to her heartbeat, ready to start CPR and chest compressions if her heart gave out. Lulu’s face was ashen and her lips had turned white, as she flitted in and out of consciousness.
“Stay with us, stay right here,” Forbess told her. “Help is coming.”
As the doctors worked on Lulu, Quinnelly turned to a man next to her and pulled the drawstring from his bathing suit. She knelt next to Lulu and wrapped the drawstring around her upper arm, pulling it tight. Lulu’s eyes widened with pain.
“Sweet girl,” Quinnelly told her, “I’m so sorry. I know this hurts. It has to hurt in order for it to work.”
Ellie, Lulu’s twin, also knelt next to her sister. She held Lulu’s right hand and told her she was doing great, that everything would be OK. Then, their mother, Ann Blair Gribbin, who had been further down the beach, walked up. She saw Lulu’s leg and screamed. Several bystanders had to pull her away.
As Lulu slipped in and out of consciousness, Quinnelly tried to keep her awake.
“Sweetheart,” she asked, “what’s your name?”
The girl replied, in barely a whisper, “Lulu.”
Closing the beach
According to incident reports, the first emergency response teams to Lulu’s scene began arriving at 3:01 p.m., or six minutes after the initial 911 call. Quinnelly and others on the scene claim it was longer – around 12 to 15 minutes – before help arrived.
A white South Walton Fire District truck – the same type of truck Quinnelly saw speeding toward Watersound earlier – backed up on the sand. Someone handed Quinnelly an oxygen mask, which she gently slid over Lulu’s face. Paramedics asked her to let go of the towels and drawstring Quinnelly had wrapped around Lulu’s arm so they could place proper tourniquets around her arm and leg. For the first time since Lulu emerged from the water, Quinnelly let go of her arm.
Then, they rolled Lulu onto a board, loaded her in the bed of the truck and drove a short distance to the boardwalk. From there, EMS teams carried her up three flights of stairs, across the boardwalk and to a waiting ambulance. McCray, Lulu’s friend who was with her in the water, was bitten on the foot by the shark. The wound was bandaged at the scene and she was transported to a hospital in Panama City Beach. She was released later that day.
As Lulu was carried up the stairs and toward the waiting ambulance, Quinnelly rejoined her friends. A group of teenage girls walked up and asked if they could all pray for Lulu. The girls, Quinnelly and the bachelorette party held hands in a circle and prayed that Lulu would make it to the hospital alive. Then, Quinnelly walked over to the edge of the dunes and threw up.
A few minutes later, she offered to give a statement to a sheriff’s deputy. As they walked over to his truck, the deputy mentioned the first shark attack nearly two hours earlier.
Quinnelly stopped abruptly. “What?”
The deputy described the shark attack involving Elisabeth in Watersound earlier that day. Cold chills slid down Quinnelly’s spine, followed by a surge of anger. She looked up at the flags: They were still flapping yellow and purple.
At the same time paramedics began to respond, sheriff’s officials were also in motion.
Two minutes after the initial call came in reporting Lulu’s attack, Vaughan, the beach safety director, was on the phone again with Hogeboom, the sheriff’s captain.
County officials say they made the decision at that moment to close the beaches. All 26 miles of South Walton beaches should switch to double red flags.
The decision came at 2:57 p.m. – 97 minutes after initial reports of the first shark attack in Watersound, according to incident reports. Thirteen minutes later, text message alerts pinged into the cell phones of subscribers to the South Walton Fire District’s beach flag alert system: “Double Red Flags – Water Closed to Public.”
At a news conference later that day, Adkinson praised the bystanders who helped Elisabeth and Lulu, as well as the fire district’s response.
Crawford, the fire district chief, reiterated the challenges of closing all county beaches at once.
“There’s 26 miles of beaches in Walton County,” he said at the press conference. “Traversing that 26 miles and physically changing the flags takes some time.”
In after-action reports, officials note they followed both county guidelines and United States Lifeguard Association protocols by not closing all beaches until there was a second severe attack.
Fire district officials also noted that both attacks occurred far from any lifeguard tower, slowing response.
“Noteworthy that both incidents took place in tertiary zones – miles from nearest tower locations …” one incident report said.
Naylor, the shark researcher, also praised the actions of county officials in the wake of the attacks. “Given the circumstances,” he said, “I can’t think of a better compromised decision than the one they made.”
Quinnelly, who helped save Lulu, said she and others at the scene were stunned to hear of the first attack.
“Had I known that there was a shark attack at that beach, I would not have been in the water,” she said later. “And I guarantee you Lulu wouldn’t have been either.”
At around 4 p.m., Quinnelly and her friends gathered their things, trudged up the boardwalk stairs and started the long walk back to their rental. A few families were still heading toward the beach, unaware of the drama that had just unfolded there.
“They’re closing the beach,” Quinnelly told them. “Someone just got bit by a shark.”
‘I made it!’
Elisabeth was stabilized at HCA Fort Walton-Destin Hospital, then airlifted to a hospital in Richmond, Va., closer to her home in Ashland. She’s had 18 surgeries, including plastic surgery, and will likely have more, according to an online post.
On July 24, she began rehab, “where they will focus on her amputated arm and her walking,” it said.
A GiveSendGo page started by the family to help with medical expenses has raised less than half of the stated goal of $250,000.
Lulu underwent a series of emergency surgeries and procedures at Ascension Sacred Heart hospital in Pensacola. She had lost two-thirds of her blood and her right leg was amputated midway between her hip and knee, but she, too, survived. When they removed her breathing tube the following day, she looked up at her family and whispered, “I made it!” Later, she was airlifted to a hospital with double-amputee specialists, where she continued to recover.
Thanks in part to a series of detailed online postings by her mother, Ann Blair Gribbin, Lulu’s recovery has reached near-celebrity status. Luminaries including Alabama football coach Nick Saban, former NBA legend Charles Barkley and country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood have posted get-well videos to her newly created Instagram site, which has gained more than 151,000 followers. Pictures of Lulu – smile beaming, hair up in tight braids – show her playing cards with siblings or trying out a new prosthetic leg. A line of hats and T-shirts were also created to help raise money for ongoing medical care.
Her story also caught Washington’s attention.
On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-Ala.) announced she was introducing legislation – known as “Lulu’s Law” – that would urge local, state and federal agencies to transmit localized “wireless emergency alerts” to people’s cell phones following shark attacks, the way it does for extreme weather, missing children or wildfires.
“We are eternally grateful that Lulu survived the shark attack on June 7,” Ann Blair Gribbin and her husband, Joe, said in a statement. “However, we remain in disbelief this accident occurred. This was the second attack that day in close proximity, and it could have been prevented with a better alert system.”
Adkinson, the sheriff, said he was pained to learn of the extent of the injuries of all three victims that day. “It’s just a terrible, terrible situation,” he said. “These are life-changing, catastrophic injuries.”
He said he would like to try to improve the way the county reacts to traumatic events on the shoreline, including finding ways to move victims off the beach faster. Florida officials should also consider passing statewide guidelines on how to respond to severe shark attacks, rather than leaving it up to communities, Adkinson said.
Meanwhile, he said, keeping sharks and swimmers apart remains a challenging – if not futile – goal.
“There’s no way that anything either the South Fire Walton District or the Walton County Sheriff’s Office can do that would prevent that from happening again tomorrow,” Adkinson said. “No more than I can prevent a tornado or a hurricane.”
Back to the beach
The day after the attacks, South Walton downgraded to single red flags, and beaches again filled with visitors, including Watersound and Seacrest beaches.
On Sunday, two days after the attacks, Andrew Cady got back out on his Sea-Doos, this time with his son, Brandon, 22, and his son’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, 19.
They motored about 100 yards offshore, marveling at the manatees, stingrays, tarpon and sea turtles. Near Grayton Beach, a 7-foot bull shark bumped Cady’s Sea-Doo repeatedly, swam under Brandon’s Sea-Doo, then burst out of the water between the two watercraft. Cady caught the encounter on his GoPro and posted it to his Facebook site, along with the earlier brush with the shark at Inlet Beach.
Again, he raced to the nearby beach, warning swimmers of the shark.
For now, Cady said he won’t let his kids back in the water until he better understands what’s happening with the sharks.
“There’s something going on in the population of sharks in the area we’re just not comfortable with,” he said.
Since the June 7 attacks, there have been at least eight more shark attacks in Florida and Texas, including four in one day off South Padre Island, Texas.
On June 10, three days after the 30A attacks, Seacrest Beach, the site of Lulu’s encounter, was a sea of blue and pink beach umbrellas, with hundreds of visitors arriving early to sunbathe or splash in the surf.
At about 9:30 a.m., several people claimed to have spotted a shark in the shallows. Bathers rushed out of the water and stood on the shoreline, pointing, as a large, shadowy figure cut through the clear water.
Behind them, yellow and purple flags fluttered in the breeze over the boardwalk, welcoming more visitors to the beach.
Jervis is an Austin-based national correspondent for USA TODAY. Follow him on X: @MrRJervis.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida shark attacks: How bystanders saved two lives
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