Newly released body camera footage has captured the horrifying moments after a nine-year-old girl nearly lost her hands in a shark attack while snorkelling off the coast of Florida. Leah Lendel was swimming near the shore at a beach in Boca Grande on Wednesday, June 11, when a shark attacked, partially severing her hand, her mother, Nadia Lendel, told NBC Miami.

Ms Lendel told police that her daughter flew out of the water, and when she looked over, “I don’t know if I heard a yell or what, but […] I see her hand hanging like a piece and there’s blood everywhere”. “I started screaming to my husband to hurry up and get out because I had so many babies, I didn’t know who to grab. I got the point, it’s a shark,” she continued. Police body camera footage captured the moments following the attack, as rescue crews worked to stop the bleeding.

“Hi there, sweetheart, you’re being very brave,” one officer can be heard telling the little girl.

Leah’s father, who was swimming several feet away, rushed to help his daughter to shore while several witnesses rushed over to help.

“We were just sitting down, taking lunch and we start hearing like, ‘Help,’ so we jumped out of the water, we jumped out of the chair, he jumped on the water to take the shark out of his hands,” said one witness.

Leah’s hand was wrapped in towels, and then she was airlifted to Tampa General Hospital for emergency surgery.

Doctors inserted pins to stabilise her broken bones and transferred arteries from her leg to help restore blood flow to her hand. Her mother posted on social media on June 13 that Leah could move all of her fingers.

However, she will still require therapy for her hand to function properly again.

“The doctors were able to do some miracles and put her hand back together,” her uncle, Max Derinsky told NBC News. “She will be in the hospital for a while and then a lot of physical therapy to hopefully get her hand functioning again.”

Boca Grande Fire Chief C.W. Blosser said in a social media video that the nine-year-old is the first swimmer bitten by a shark in the area in two decades. In 2024, there were 14 unprovoked shark bites in Florida, the most of any American state, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.