(NewsNation) — A teenager has described how she punched and fought off two sharks that attacked her while she was on a family vacation in Belize.
Annabelle Carlson, 16 of Colorado, was on a scuba diving trip with her mom three hours off the coast of Belize in August 2024 when she and her siblings decided to jump off their boat.
Carlson jumped off the boat first and told “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” on Friday that as soon as she hit the water, “a shark came from under the boat and started biting my hands.”
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She reacted quickly and “threw a few punches,” explaining that fighting off the beast was her first instinct.
“I didn’t really know what was going on, and then it kind of dawned on me that I was being attacked by a shark,” Carlson said.
She described the shark as around 6 feet long and said it was a reef shark.
Second shark attacks her leg
As she was being attacked, her family and other onlookers started to yell and threw a life ring in her direction.
“I kind of looped it in my arm because my hands were pretty damaged, and they started to pull me in, and that’s when the second shark attacked,” she recounted.
She told local NewsNation affiliate KDVR in Denver, Colorado, that people started throwing oxygen tanks at the shark in an attempt to get it off of her.
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Annabelle described the second attack as “pretty serious.”
“My leg was pretty much gone … it was kind of just bone from right below my knee to my ankle,” she said.
Emergency response and amputation
It took Carlson and her family nearly an hour and a half to reach an island, where they could take a helicopter to Belize Healthcare Partners hospital in Belize City. Her leg was amputated there, and less than 24 hours later, she was transferred to a hospital in Miami for further treatment.
Despite the trauma and a rare infection during recovery, Carlson remains optimistic. She has already returned to scuba diving and says she chooses to focus on the positive side of life.
“I feel like its best to see the positive side of things,” she said.
Last Halloween, she dressed up as a shark attack survivor alongside her friend, who wore a shark costume.
Annabelle Carlson, 16, dressed up as a shark attack survivor next to her friend in a shark costume (image from Annabelle Carlson)
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