Dina Spann’s desperate 911 calls have surfaced, revealing the chaos after a 9-foot alligator shredded her arm during a family outing on a Florida river.
The retired 58-year-old mother was floating in the Silver River in Marion County on Aug. 8 when the beast lunged and locked onto her right forearm, her son Zach Guerrina, 38, later told The Post. Bystanders who rushed to help made two frantic emergency calls as they struggled to get Spann onto a boat and stop the bleeding.
“Somebody got bit by an alligator, I think her arm got bit –– it’s dangling off,” a woman can be heard telling the operator in the first call. “She lost half an arm.”
As the caller screams to others on the scene, the operator asks whether the arm was fully amputated. “I think so,” the woman replies.
In a second call, a man tells the operator their location on the Silver River while a woman screams and cries in the background. “Her arm is gone,” he says.
Guerrina, a carpenter and father of five, had left his mother in the water with two teenage relatives and his brother’s girlfriend just minutes before the attack. He said Spann fought back with her bare hands, losing part of her left ring finger before the gator clamped down on her dominant arm.
“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,” he added.
Onlookers fashioned a tourniquet from Spann’s own bikini top and a rope to stem the bleeding from her right arm as they worked to get her to safety.
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. The Silver River was reopened to the public once the animal was captured.
Spann revealed the devastating extent of her injuries in a video posted to Facebook in September, showing her right arm amputated below the elbow and her left ring finger missing. “The gator got a piece of me. It didn’t get the best of me,” she wrote.
Guerrina had previously described his mother’s arm as “hanging by a thread” in the immediate aftermath.
The attack on Spann came amid a brutal summer of alligator encounters across Florida. Hiker Brittany Clark, 41, was killed by a 13-foot gator while swimming in the Econlockhatchee River at Little Big Econ State Forest on June 28. DNA testing later confirmed the massive reptile was responsible for her death. Eleven-year-old Brodie Terry, visiting from Pennsylvania, lost his hand to an 8-foot, 7-inch gator in Marion County on June 27 while releasing a fish back into the water. In October, 71-year-old Steven Hamilton of Winter Garden was killed by a 12-foot alligator while fishing on the shoreline of Lake Apopka; his autopsy revealed “blunt force” leg injuries sustained as he was dragged underwater.
Spann’s case stands out among the season’s violence for her survival and fierce resistance during the attack itself. Where other victims were overwhelmed, she actively battled the predator to protect her legs and her life.
The retired mother has since used social media to document her recovery and maintain a defiant attitude toward the animal that maimed her.