Dina Spann has spoken out for the first time since losing part of her arm to an alligator, posting raw hospital footage that shows the severity of her wounds.
Spann, 58, a retired Florida mother, uploaded the video to Facebook last Friday from her hospital bed, her right arm bandaged below the elbow where doctors amputated, and half her left ring finger gone too. The attack happened Aug. 8 on the Silver River in Marion County while she was on a family boating trip.
“Recovery isn’t always pretty, but I’m learning to laugh through the hard parts and celebrate every little victory,” Spann wrote on Facebook alongside the footage.
“The gator got a piece of me. It didn’t get the best of me.”
Her son, Zach Guerrina, 38, a carpenter and father of five, had left Spann floating in the river with two teenage relatives and his brother’s girlfriend just minutes before the alligator struck. He later described how his mother’s arm was left “hanging by a thread” after the animal latched onto her right forearm.
“She wasn’t just letting it happen,” Guerrina said. “She was trying to hold its mouth shut, swimming to the top to get a breath of fresh air and keep it from biting on her legs.”
“It had her but she said she was trying to make sure it didn’t get to her legs.”
Bystanders rushed to help and improvised a tourniquet using Spann’s bikini top and an anchor rope to stem the bleeding from her right arm. Guerrina recalled his mother’s remarkable composure amid the chaos.
“They tied up the arm with an anchor rope as well, so it had her bathing suit top and an anchor rope on her right arm, and she was just as calm as a f–king cucumber,” he said.
“It was a crazy situation and she was the calmest one there, with her arm hanging off by a f–king thread.”
Good Samaritans Mike Head and John Gamache were among those who came to Spann’s aid after witnessing the attack unfold.
Trappers contracted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission removed a 9-foot, 8-inch alligator from the river the day after the attack, after which officials reopened the waterway to the public. Swimming in the Silver River is prohibited.
Guerrina pointed to tourist behavior as the root cause, saying visitors get too close to alligators and even pet and feed them.
The incident came amid a brutal summer for alligator encounters across the state. Hiker Brittany Clark was killed by a 13-foot gator while swimming in the Econlockhatchee River at Little Big Econ State Forest on June 28. Just one day earlier, 11-year-old Brodie Terry from Pennsylvania lost his hand to an 8-foot, 7-inch alligator in Marion County while on a fishing trip with his father; the animal attacked as the boy was about to release a fish back into the water. Another child lost his hand in June during a fishing trip with his dad.
Spann’s video and defiant message mark her first public statement since the attack that changed her life.
