A 10-year-old visitor to the Keys underwent surgery to amputate a portion of his leg after being bitten by a shark at Looe Key Reef on Aug. 13, according to his family.
In a Facebook post describing the incident, Joshua Reeder said his nephew Jameson Reeder Jr. was snorkeling at the reef when he took “a crushing blow below his knee.” Though not yet officially confirmed, the post claims the bite was delivered by an eight-foot bull shark.
While managing to cling to a floating noodle, the boy’s family pulled him to a boat, where they enlisted the help of an off-duty nurse to apply a tourniquet above the wound to slow bleeding, the post says.
After transferring Jameson to a faster boat that volunteered to help, he was rushed to shore and eventually airlifted via Trauma Star to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami.
According to both the Facebook post and a funding page set up by family friend James Miller, Jameson Jr. underwent a successful surgery to amputate the portion of his leg below the knee, but remains in good spirits as he recovers. As of Aug. 16, the page had raised more than $54,000 to assist Reeder and his family.
“(The family) could have lost their sweet boy, but Jameson knew Jesus was with him,” reads the funding page. “The whole way Jameson said ‘Jesus is going to save me’ and he did! … One thing we know for sure, is Jameson Jr.’s fearless faith in God carried him through.”
On the day of the bite, 17-year-old Sugarloaf Key resident Daniel Verne was swimming nearby on the reef with two friends when a commotion erupted around him.
“This one boat was flying by on Looe Key, and they were screaming ‘shark bite’ and they were doing hand signals for a shark bite, so we basically all got back onto the boat,” Verne told Keys Weekly. “We were maybe 20 to 50 feet from this boat. … I just knew it was a kid because someone was carrying him.”
In spite of the incident, Verne said he and his friends re-entered the water a few minutes after the boat left, but didn’t see any shark activity the rest of their time at the reef.
Though the popular snorkel and dive destination is widely known as a common site for smaller, more docile reef sharks, bull shark sightings there are far less frequent.
“I’ve lived here basically my whole life, and I’ve seen a couple of reef sharks around, but I haven’t seen anything else,” said Verne.
The Looe Key bite is the third reported bite in five months in the Florida Keys. Though none of the bites was fatal, they left the victims with significant injuries. An April 17 bite at the Islamorada sandbar near Whale Harbor left one man with deep lacerations in his leg, while a June 29 bite on Summerland Key sent 35-year-old Lindsay Bruns of Flower Mound, Texas to the hospital for more than a week as she underwent multiple surgeries to repair most of the function in her injured leg.
Florida has long reigned atop the list of locations where unprovoked shark bites have occurred, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File (ISAF). In 2021, the ISAF confirmed 73 unprovoked shark bites, with 47 occurring in the United States. Florida topped the list of states reporting bites with 28 reported incidents; Hawaii was a distant second with six. Most unprovoked bites are believed to be a case of mistaken identity on the part of the shark.
Keys Weekly will update this story as more details become available.
