Dad recalls horrific moment 10-year-old son was attacked by shark in Florida: ‘I heard the screaming’

It was a sunny August Saturday when Mary and Jameson Reeder took a boat nine miles out into Looe Key Reef with their four children, for a day of swimming and snorkeling in the crystal clear waters of the Florida Keys.

“The kids were diving, splashing, just having the best time,” writes Jameson in “Rescue at the Reef: The Miraculous True Story of a Little Boy with Big Faith” (Worthy).

As Jameson swam with his youngest son, Nehemiah, his oldest boy, 10-year-old Jameson Jr. grabbed a GoPro video camera and dived down to the seabed to see what he could find.

“Then I heard the screaming,” Jameson recalls.

On the boat, Mary Reeder thought her son had been stung by a jellyfish. But when she and her husband dragged him back on the boat, she was shocked by her son’s leg.

“I saw some of his ragged skin and then just bone – way too much bone – and it seemed to keep going and going until his bloody foot rose past me,” she writes.

“His lower leg was all bone. Just below the knee, all the way to the ankle. And then the foot.”

Instantly, the couple knew it was a shark attack. 

“Nothing else could do that damage,” she adds. “It was a horrific, almost unreal sight.”

But the family was still nine miles off-shore, and the nearest hospital was another 20 miles away.

As Mary writes, a “terrifying realization was still settling into my chest. I’m going to lose my son!” 

They weren’t totally alone, though. Other boats soon came to their assistance including one with a nurse onboard who swam to the Reeders with a first aid kit, despite the fact that the shark was likely still nearby and there was blood in the water.

Racing back to the shore, Mary feared the worst. “He had lost so much blood, more than I’d ever seen,” she remembers. “I was trying to keep him awake, to get him to keep his eyes open, praying that he wouldn’t die.”

When they reached the marina, an ambulance was waiting to transport Jameson to a nearby church — where a helicopter would airlift him to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, a thirty-minute flight away.

There, as doctors examined his injuries, the extent of the damage was clear. As the Reeders explain, the surgeons couldn’t save Jameson’s leg, because there was nothing left to save.

“I had been worried that my son might lose his life. Then I’d been worried that Jameson would lose his leg, but in this moment I realized he had already lost it,” adds Mary.

While she and her husband deliberated over giving permission to amputate their son’s leg, a doctor intervened.

“You don’t have to make this decision,” he told them. “The shark made it for you. You’re off the hook.”

The family learned that it almost certainly had been a bull shark — eight to 10 feet long, weighing between 300 and 500 pounds.

“We hadn’t seen it,” adds Mary. “A quarter‐ton animal twice as long as our kid had snuck up on us.”

In a wild twist, their suspicions were confirmed when the boy’s GoPro video camera was recovered — and the Reeders could see exactly what had happened.

First there was a shadow. Then a tail and a fin.

A cloud of blood filled the screen before a shark’s tooth appeared and then drifted out of view.

“It wasn’t an exaggeration to say he had fought a Goliath and won,” says Jameson Sr.

Statistically, write the Reeders, you have a greater chance of being struck by lightning on five separate occasions than you do of ever being attacked by a shark.

What’s more, there had never been a single recorded shark attack at Looe Key Reef in recorded history.

Jameson had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When the boy awoke after 10-hour surgery he said he couldn’t feel his toes. A doctor asked what he remembered of the incident and why he thought he couldn’t feel them.

Then the realization kicked in.

“He didn’t say anything,” writes Mary. “He was processing the question, trying to find his way from it to an impossible and horrible answer.”

Jameson required three more surgeries as physicians attempted to graft new skin to what was left of the bottom of his leg.

But he shocked his family by saying he wanted to go back to the reef, just four days after the attack.

“Dad,” Jameson said, “I don’t want the shark, this hospital, and my leg to be my worst nightmare. I want to face my fear and move forward.” 

The attack also had profoundly different effects on his three siblings.

Brother Noah, 8, for example, wanted to stick close to Jameson to make sure he was all right.

Six-year-old sister Eliana, meanwhile, didn’t even want to talk about what happened. “Whenever we tell the story to someone, Eliana goes into another room or covers her ears or puts on headphones,” writes Mary.

Youngest brother Nehemiah, 3, thinks his brother is a superhero. “He brags about it to people,” says Jameson Sr. “He just thinks it’s so cool: ‘My brother got bit by a bull shark.’”

The family, meanwhile, attributed their son’s miraculous survival to their faith. “I felt so certain that God was leading every snap decision,” writes Jameson Sr. “Every moment felt like we had been guided into doing the best thing.”

Jameson told his parents that in the aftermath of the attack, while he was drifting in and out of consciousness on the boat back to shore, he had seen a “person on fire” standing on the boat.

“I knew it was Jesus,” he told them, adding: “It was the worst and best day of my life.”

Three months after the attack, Jameson — who still swims and skateboards and plays basketball with friends — received his first prosthetic leg. Before the year was over, he went surfing.

On the one-year anniversary of the incident, the Reeder family returned to Looe Key Reef to swim in the same waters.

“We did see some sharks when we got in the water. That definitely made it more frightening, more intense,” recalls Jameson Sr.  “But Jameson still jumped in.”