A teenage girl who was attacked in a horrifying shark attack looked 'lifeless' after losing her leg and hand to the apex predator, her mother revealed.
In a scene that seemed straight out of Jaws, Lulu Gribbin, 15, and McCray Faust, 17, were swimming in the clear blue water of Pensacola Florida when a shark brutally attacked them.
Lulu, was on a mother-daughter trip from Alabama when the attack happened. Sunbathers had only just gotten word of sharks in the water before they found out it was too late, as Lulu’s twin sister, Ellie, ran up onto the beach saying Lulu had been attacked.
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Her mother, Ann Blair Gribbin, wrote online: “She was lifeless, her eyes closed, mouth white and pale. The wound on her leg or all that was left of her leg was something out of a movie. I finally made it back to her and held her hand and she saw me, and I told her I was there.”
In a potentially life-saving twist of fate, two doctors happened to be on holiday on the beach when the attack happened. They provided immediate emergency care to the wounded girl, who was quickly airlifted to Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola. Her mother said she prayed the entire way.
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Gribben survived the bites, but once she got to hospital was told she would lose her right hand, and her left leg would be amputated from below the knee. She also lost two-thirds of her blood in the gruesome attack.
On Saturday (June 8), Lulu’s vitals had improved so much that the tube was taken out of her throat and she began breathing on her own.
“This was a first big step,” Ann wrote. “Once she was settled her first words to us were ‘I made it.’ And boy she did.”
An hour and half later on the same Friday, 45-year old Elisabeth Foley was also attacked in the water at a different beach along the Pensacola coastline. Experts assume it was the same shark that developed a taste for blood earlier that day.
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