At dusk, two days after the fourth of July, Jessie Arbogast was having a Kodak moment on the beach in Pensacola, Fla. The Gulf waves were mild, no higher than a foot and a half. His sister and the other girls had ventured out much farther, but Jessie, 8, his brothers and some cousins stayed 15 ft. from shore, crouched in the shallow surf. Then, one brother felt something swish by his leg, and Jessie saw the sharp fins of a bull shark protruding 2 ft. above the water. The shark took an exploratory bite of his arm and a chunk of his thigh. "He's got me!" Jessie yelled. "Get him off! Get him off me!"
On shore, his uncle Vance Flosenzier turned toward the screaming children and saw blood coloring the ocean. He and another man sprinted into the surf and found the 7.4-ft., 200-lb. shark about to roll away, its jaw on Jessie's arm. Vance, who trains for triathlons, grabbed the shark by its sandpapery tail and tried to pull, but it would not budge. He yanked again, and Jessie fell away, his arm ripping, as the shark clamped down. Aware that two girls were still farther out in the water, Vance walked backward, pulling the shark along the sandy bottom of the shallow sea toward shore. With Jessie's arm only partly swallowed, the shark tried to wiggle free from Vance's barehanded grasp. But Vance, at 6 ft. 1 in. and 200 lbs., held on and dragged it to shore where his wife Diana and others had laid Jessie on the sand.
"Shark! My brother's been bitten by a shark!" a boy yelled as he ran down the beach. Tourists Trina Casagrande and Susanne Werton of St. Louis, Mo., thought it was a prank and kept walking. Then they saw the chaos and the crowd gathered around the unmoving body of a boy, the red muscle of his thigh exposed and looking like a "bite [had been taken] out of a drumstick." The women could not see much blood. Most of it had drained from the boy into the Gulf. Jessie's lips were whiter than his face and body. His eyes were open, but rolled back.
"We have to get him covered up," Werton told her friend. All they could find were a sheet and beach towels. Werton took over CPR compressions from Vance as Diana blew air into Jessie's mouth. Werton counted to five, then pushed five times, then counted again as Diana blew. His chest rose, so they knew they were getting air into him.
The shark attack had severed Jessie's arm 4 in. below the shoulder. Vance tied towels into tourniquets and used T shirts to cover the bone sticking out from the stump, slowing the loss of what little blood was left in the boy's body. Breathless but calm, Vance used his cell phone to call the 911 dispatcher, "The right arm and right leg are gone... Completely gone. He's lost a lot of blood... He wasn't breathing, and he didn't have a pulse a minute ago... We need a life helicopter out here or something like that."