9-year-old girl nearly loses her hand in shark attack off Florida Gulf Coast
Lee County Sheriff’s Office
(BOCA GRANDE, Fla.) — A 9-year-old girl was attacked by a shark while snorkeling off the Florida Gulf Coast, with the animal nearly biting her entire hand off, her family said.
At approximately 12 p.m. on Wednesday, 9-year-old Leah Lendel was swimming in Boca Grande, Florida, near the shore, with her mother and two younger siblings about 4 feet away from her, Leah’s family said in a statement provided to ABC News.
Leah then went underwater to snorkel, but as she came up, “she screamed,” the family said.
Her mother, Nadia Lendel, looked over and saw her daughter’s right hand “up to the wrist all in blood and mostly torn off,” the family said.
As the mother screamed for help, she attempted to get Leah and her other children out to shore, with her husband — who was snorkeling “some distance away” — swimming “as fast as possible to shore,” the family said.
Once Leah made it to the shore, nearby construction workers who were on their lunch break assisted the family by calling for paramedics and putting a towel “to make a tourniquet and stop the blood loss,” the family said.
One of the construction workers, Alfonso Tello, told ABC Southwest Florida affiliate WZVN the shark that attacked Leah was about 8 feet long.
“Everybody was in shock,” Tello told WZVN.
After paramedics arrived on scene, they decided to airlift Leah to Tampa General Hospital for treatment, the Boca Grande Fire Department told ABC News in a statement.
Leah underwent a “long surgery” once at the hospital, the family said.
“We ask for mostly prayers and privacy at this time so we can process the situation,” the family said in a statement.
The status of Leah’s condition as of Thursday remains unclear.
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Marshals in Florida have led a missing child operation this month that “resulted in the recovery or safe location of 60 critically missing children,” across the state, officials said.
The U.S. Marshals Service Middle District of Florida — working with a number of law enforcement partners — launched Operation DRAGON EYE, a two-week initiative geared to “recover or safely locate the most critically missing youth” that the U.S. Marshals are calling “the most successful missing child operation in USMS history,” according to a statement from the U.S. Marshals Service on Monday.
“This operation had three primary objectives: recover critically missing youth, provide them with essential services including appropriate placement, and to deter bad actors exploiting missing child vulnerabilities,” officials said in their announcement of the results of the operation. “DRAGON EYE resulted in eight arrests, including charges of human trafficking, child endangerment, narcotics possession, and custodial interference.”
Authorities said that Operation DRAGON EYE was the product of a “multidisciplinary task force of federal, state, and local government agencies, as well as social service entities, the medical community, and non-governmental organizations.”
The USMS defines “critically missing” children as those at risk of crimes of violence or those with other elevated risk factors such as substance abuse, sexual exploitation, crime exposure, or domestic violence, authorities said, and recovered children were provided with medical resources, nourishment, social services and child advocates.
Officials working on Operation DRAGON EYE said they are proud of this operation’s achievements which located children across Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties in Florida.
“I have to curtail my enthusiasm because of the sensitivity of the victims involved in this operation, but the successful recovery of 60 missing children, complemented with the arrest of eight individuals, including child predators, signifies the most successful missing child recovery effort in the history of the United States Marshals Service; or to my knowledge, any other similar operation held in the United States,” said William Berger, U.S. Marshal for the Middle District of Florida. “The unique part of this operation was the fact that underaged critically missing children ranging from age 9 to 17 were not only recovered but were debriefed and provided with physical and psychological care. This operation further included follow-up assistance in hopes that these youth will not return to the streets to be further victimized.”
Said Callahan Walsh, Executive Director, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: “The success of Operation DRAGON EYE is a testament to what’s possible when agencies unite with a shared mission to protect children,” “We’re proud to have supported the U.S. Marshals Service and our partners in Florida to recover these missing children and provide critical support to those who need it most. NCMEC is honored to stand alongside these teams and will continue working tirelessly to help make sure that every child has a safe childhood.”
(NEW YORK) — A federal appeals court on Friday declined to rehear President Trump’s challenge to a $5 million civil judgment after a jury found him liable in 2023 for the battery and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s.
A jury in Manhattan federal court found in 2023 that Trump attacked Carroll in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s and later defamed her when he denied her claim.
Trump had sought a hearing before the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit after a three-judge panel declined to overturn the judgment.
A divided court left intact the decision upholding the jury’s damage award.
The appellate court denial of an en banc hearing came without explanation, as is common.
In a concurring opinion, three judges said they found “no manifest error by the district court” that would warrant additional review.
In dissent, Judge Steven Menashi, a Trump appointee, said the district court should have allowed the defense to present evidence that Trump believed Carroll’s lawsuit “had been concocted by his political opposition — and therefore that he was not speaking with actual malice.”
In a statement responding to Friday’s decision, Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said, “E. Jean Carroll is very pleased with today’s decision. Although President Trump continues to try every possible maneuver to challenge the findings of two separate juries, those efforts have failed. He remains liable for sexual assault and defamation.”
Trump is also appealing a separate defamation award of $83 million to Carroll.
Dozens of first responders crowd the street in front of Annunciation Catholic Church that was the scene of a shooting that killed two children and wounded seventeen other people on Wednesday, August 27, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minn. (Renee Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
(MINNEAPOLIS) — A motive in the Annunciation Catholic School mass shooting remains under investigation, and police said they’ve not identified a specific trigger for why the children at this church were targeted.
Investigators determined that Westman “harbored a whole lot of hate towards a wide variety of people and groups of people,” and also “had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told ABC News Live on Thursday.
“This person, you know, committed this act with the intention of causing as much terror, as much trauma, as much carnage as possible for their own personal notoriety,” O’Hara said.
“The shooter expressed hate towards almost every group,” Joe Thompson, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said at a news conference on Thursday. “The shooter expressed hate towards Black people, the shooter expressed hate towards Mexican people, the shooter expressed hate towards Christian people, the shooter expressed hate towards Jewish people. In short, the shooter appeared to hate all of us.”
The shooter also “expressed hate” toward President Donald Trump, he said.
“There appears to be only one group that the shooter didn’t hate, one group of people who the shooter admired — the group were the school shooters and mass murderers that are notorious in this country,” Thompson said.
“More than anything, the shooter wanted to kill children, defenseless children. … The shooter wanted to watch children suffer,” Thompson said.
An 8-year-old and a 10-year-old were killed and 18 people — including 15 kids — were injured when the shooter opened fire through the windows of the Minneapolis school’s church on Wednesday morning. All injured victims are expected to survive, police said.
Westman never entered the church building, but could have entered after shooting out a door-sized window, O’Hara told ABC News.
“These children were slaughtered by a shooter who could not see them,” O’Hara said at a news conference, noting the shooter “was standing outside of the building firing through very narrow church windows.”
Westman died at the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Driver’s license information reviewed by ABC News described Westman as a female, born on June 17, 2002. A name change application for a minor born on the same date, June 17, 2002, was approved by a district court in Minnesota in 2020, changing the name of a Robert Westman to Robin Westman, explaining the minor child “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
Investigators are reviewing hundreds of pages of documents, videos and other evidence as they look for a motive, O’Hara said.
Police have also conducted dozens of interviews with witnesses as well as people who knew the suspect, though investigators “have not been successful” in talking to Westman’s mother, the chief said.
Officials are investigating a series of videos posted to YouTube believed to be associated with the suspect, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the matter. Two videos, posted Wednesday morning and since removed by YouTube, show someone flipping through dozens of pages of notes dated over the course of several months, which include what appears to be doodles of weapons, middle fingers and expletives, as well as repeated references to killing.
Writings in notebooks and on the guns indicate a series of grievances, anger and ideations of harm to self and to others. The writings also appear to show overt references to other high-profile school shootings and shooters.
Officers recovered three guns — one rifle, one shotgun and one handgun — at the scene, all of which are believed to have been fired in the attack, police said. All of the guns were purchased legally by Westman, police said, and authorities believe they were purchased recently in Minnesota.
Three shotgun shells and 116 rifle rounds were recovered, police said. One live round was recovered from a handgun that appeared to malfunction, leaving the bullet stuck in the chamber, the chief said.
As Minneapolis mourns, Mayor Jacob Frey is stressing the need for gun control, telling ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” “How many times have you heard politicians talk of an ‘unspeakable tragedy’? And yet this kind of thing happens again and again.”
“Prayers, thoughts, they are certainly welcomed, but they are not enough,” Frey said. “There needs to be change so that we don’t have another mayor, in another month-and-a half, talking about a tragedy that happened in their city.”
Danielle Gunter, whose son, an eighth grader, was shot and wounded, said in a statement to Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP, “We feel the pain, the anger, the confusion, and the searing reality that our lives will never be the same. Yet we still have our child.”
“We grieve and we pray: for the others who were shot, for their families, and for those who lost loved ones,” she said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he’s sending state law enforcement to help with security at schools and places of worship in the city.
ABC News’ Alex Perez, Alyssa Acquavella, Mariama Jalloh, Pierre Thomas, Jack Date, Luke Barr, Aaron Katersky and Sasha Pezenik contributed to this report.
