To save her own life, Damiana Humphrey engaged in combat with a shark. The 19-year-old was on vacation in the Galveston region from Oklahoma with her family on May 28 when the incident happened. While Humphrey and her siblings were submerged in the water to about waist level, her sister-in-law noticed something dark in the crashing waves.
Humphrey told Fox26, “As I was turning, a shark grabbed a hold of my hand. I looked down and there was a shark attached to my hand, so I guess I started punching it. That part is kind of blurry to me. They said [the shark] was about four to five feet.”
After the encounter, the shark let go and swam away and she quickly got her siblings and herself out of the water.
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Humphrey’s father, Troy, told “Good Morning America“, “I noticed that she had her hand held up and that it was bleeding down her arm.”
First responders from Galveston took the adolescent to the hospital, where she had hand surgery. She will have to leave her job as a patient care technician for the summer since she said four tendons were severed and she won’t be able to use her hand for several weeks.
She is nevertheless relieved that it wasn’t worse and is eager to use physical therapy to fully heal.
Humphrey’s attack was unusual in the area, according to Peter Davis, the Chief of the Galveston Beach Patrol.
Davis stated, “It’s really rare for us to have shark bites here in Galveston. I’ve worked a few of them in my career and the ones I’ve seen were shark bites, not attacks. Meaning it was a case of mistaken identity where they latched onto a human and swam away; it sounds like this may have been similar to that.”
