California teenager recovering after sea lion attack
By Dean Fioresi, Michele Gile
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LONG BEACH, California (KCAL, KCBS) — A 15-year-old Long Beach girl is still recovering from a sea lion attack that happened while she was swimming over the weekend.
Phoebe Beltran was finishing a 1,000-yard swim on Sunday at Alamitos Beach when she felt a sudden pain in her arm, and a shadow beneath her.
“I assume it’s a shark, obviously. Worst thing that can happen in the ocean, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘No, my arm would be off right now, but I still feel my fingers, I still feel my arm,'” Beltran said.
Her mother, Bibi, heard her screaming from the shore.
“Somebody yelled shark and we all rushed toward the shore, and it wasn’t until she started coming out that I realized it was my kid,” she recalled. “I just ran to her and saw her arm bloody.”
A witness to the attack sold them that he saw a sea lion near the buoy where Phoebe was swimming.
“I felt everything going on, I was just so scared, so shocked” the teen said. “But I still felt the immense pain over and over. It would grab and hold on for a while. … I couldn’t believe it was happening.”
Lifeguards brought her to shore, where she had her wounds wrapped before she was taken to the hospital.She’s still swollen and bruised days after the incident, but says it hasn’t deterred her from continuing towards her goal of becoming a junior lifeguard, which is why she was swimming on Sunday.
Local authorities and medical workers were stunned by the news.
“In my 25 years of service, I’ve never heard of something like this happening before,” said Long Beach Fire Department Marine Safety Chief Gonzalo Medina.
Beltran said that doctors theorized that a toxic algae outbreak may have poisoned the sea lion, leading to its unprecedented attack. Last month in Malibu, health officials said that more than 50 sea lions were sickened by a possible domoic acid outbreak.
“Something was wrong, something had happened, because this isn’t normal behavior for them, which is why I don’t blame the sea lion at all,” Beltran said.
There has been at least one other reported instance of a sea lion attack in Southern California in recent weeks, after a man was bitten while surfing in Oxnard.
As she continues her recovery, Beltran is just anxious for the day she’s able to get back into the ocean.
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