911 Calls Reveal Panic After Alligator Attack Cost Marion County Swimmer Her Arm

Newly released 911 calls have revealed the panic that unfolded after an alligator attacked a swimmer in the Silver River near Ray Wayside Park in Marion County this past summer, leaving her with life-altering injuries.

Dina Spann, 58, was swimming with a group in the river in August when the alligator struck. She survived but lost her right arm below the elbow and part of a finger on her left hand.

Audio of two 911 calls obtained by The New York Post captured witnesses describing the severity of her injuries in real time. “Somebody got bit by an alligator, I think her arm got bit — it’s dangling off,” one woman told a dispatcher. “She lost half an arm.”

In a second call, a woman can be heard screaming and crying as a man tells the dispatcher they are on the Silver River. “Her arm is gone,” he said.

Spann’s son, Zach Guerrina, has said his mother fought back by trying to hold the alligator’s jaws open to escape. “It had her, but she said she was trying to make sure it didn’t get to her legs,” he told the Post.

John Gamache, a park visitor, told FOX 35 Orlando he spotted the alligator’s “head way above the water and going full speed” toward the swimmers and rushed to the scene in his boat.

“It was a terrible injury, bones poking out, blood everywhere,” Gamache said. “Obviously, the minutes mattered.”

Spann was taken to a hospital following the attack. FOX 35 reported earlier this summer that she was in good spirits after returning home. Her family later called Gamache to thank him.

“They called earlier, and we talked for a while, and it was heartwarming to hear them explain their emotions,” Gamache said.

The attack is one of several alligator incidents reported in Florida this year. Earlier in the year, a child was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries after being bitten on the arm and leg while swimming in an off-limits nature preserve. In October, a 71-year-old man was killed by a nearly 12-foot alligator while fishing along the shore of Lake Apopka, marking the state’s second fatal alligator attack of the year, according to police.