Heroic Shark Attack Rescue Attempt

Swimmers Say They Had To Punch Animal As They Brought Girl To Shore

(CBS/AP)  Chris White was vacationing on a Florida Panhandle beach when he heard cries for help and leaped into the water to assist a 14-year-old girl, not knowing she had been fatally injured by a shark and he would soon be swimming with the killer animal.

"I saw an empty boogie board, no rider," said White, 23. "At first I thought she had maybe drowned or gone under."

Not Robert Atkinson, who was watching onshore.

"I see a fin and a blood pool in the water," he said.

"You knew it was an attack?" asked CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann.

"Immediately. It was like something out of a bad movie," Atkinson replied.

Jamie Marie Daigle, who had been swimming with a friend about 100 yards from shore, had been bitten in the leg by a shark. The flesh had been torn on one leg from her hip to her knee, exposing her bone.

Swimming out to the bloody scene, White passed Daigle's friend, 14-year-old Felicia Venable, who was swimming frantically back to shore.

"She couldn't tell me anything," said the state health inspector and volunteer firefighter from Carrollton, Ga., who recently completed EMT training. "She was pretty hysterical."

When White and another man with a raft reached Daigle, surfer Tim Dicus had already put the unconscious girl on his board.