Ordeal starts with gator encounter
Man loses his arm, then wanders for 4 days in Fla. swamp
Eric Merda didn’t usually have much free time between his irrigation service calls, but on July 17, he had a far more generous schedule and was looking to fill a couple of hours.
He decided to explore the Manatee Fish Camp near one of his job sites. He ended up in a swamp area near Sarasota, Florida, where he lives.
His downtime on that summer Sunday turned into what he described as a nightmare survival story: four days and three nights lost, naked and suffering alone in the swamp after an alligator bit off his right arm.
“I challenged the swamp,” Merda, 43, said last week, mostly recovered and ready to share the details of his ordeal. “The swamp challenged me back.”
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is investigating the attack, a spokesperson, Tammy Sapp, said.
A nuisance alligator trapper removed two alligators — 6 feet and 9 feet long — from Lake Manatee on July 21, she said.
By Merda’s account, he started out by exploring the swamp, but the heat grew intense, and he was parched. He wasn’t thinking straight, and he was lost. As for many Floridians, the risk of gators was not unfamiliar to him, but he decided his best shot at finding the way back to his car was by plunging into Lake Manatee.
The lake, covering about 2 square miles, is an artificial reservoir created in the middle of the last century; a state park located along part of its shore notes that it is an alligator habitat.
Within minutes of entering
the water, Merda said, he realized his clothes were dragging him down, so he shed them.
And then he saw the alligator, parallel to him in the water less than 2 feet away.
He said he tried to swim away, but the animal was faster. It latched onto his right forearm, and the two fought. The animal pulled him under three times, then bent his forearm backward. It snapped away at the elbow, and the alligator swam away with his forearm and hand in its mouth.
Merda struggled to shore, in pain and undoubtedly in
shock. He battled the disorientation and tried to keep going, sleeping as best he could when he could, but heading back to the shoreline to keep from further losing his way.
“I kept getting lost in the grasses,” he said. “I was scared to death to go back to that water, but I had to. I didn’t know how the heck else I’m going to get out of there.”
At some point, he said, the bleeding from his arm stopped, but he knew he was in bad shape. “I got bone poking out of me, muscles twitching,” he said. And in
a scene worthy of a horror movie, he said, he looked back, and “the alligator just keeps popping up here and there.”
For a period, Merda said he pulled himself on top of a stump, hoping someone would find him, but eventually decided to press on. He rested when his body would not allow him to move further.
“There was a lot of times I couldn’t keep going — a lot,” he said. “As the days got longer, of course, it got worse and worse. That last day, if I had to guess, I bet that last day I didn’t move but 100 yards.”
Flies swarmed his limb. His Reserve Officers’ Training Corps training taught him he had to tourniquet the arm, but he didn’t have anything to do it with. He was cut up from walking through thorns; his back got attacked by red ants. Scavenged purple flowers became his meals. He drank from the lake.
Merda’s family and friends started to realize something was wrong when he wasn’t posting on Facebook, he said, and they called local hospitals to try to find him.
Rescue finally came July 20, when he reached a fence of the Lake Manatee Fish Camp and found a man. The Manatee County Sheriff ’s Office and Manatee County Emergency Medical Services responded.
A helicopter evacuated him to safety, and he spent three weeks at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Doctors amputated more of his arm because it was infected, he said.
Merda’s story of his extraordinary ordeal was the latest alligator attack to catch the attention of news organizations this year.
In May, a 47-year-old man retrieving Frisbees from a public park’s lake became the first person to die of an alligator attack in Florida since 2019. In June, a man was killed and dragged into a retention pond near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Another alligator attack in South Carolina killed an 88-year-old woman in Hilton Head in August.
On the same July day that Merda lost his arm, an 80-year-old woman was killed by two alligators after she fell into a pond near her house in Englewood, Florida.
In states with high alligator populations, including Florida and Louisiana, people are at risk anytime they are near a body of water, and they should be as cautious to avoid an attack as they would to prevent drowning, according to Frank Mazzotti, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida who has worked with alligators and crocodiles in the Everglades for 40 years.
Since 2010, there have been between six and 15 unprovoked alligator bites reported per year by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In 2021, there were nine total, and none were fatal. In 2022, there have been 22 bite incidents reported, but these may not all make it into the total count, because it depends on whether they are determined to be provoked.
Alligator populations are “healthy” right now, he said, and as real estate development expands, humans may be increasing their exposure to the animals. The fish and wildlife commission manages a service, the Statewide Nuisance Alligator Program, to remove alligators believed to pose a threat to people, pets or property.
But options are few if an attack occurs. “If you’re in the jaws of an alligator and it isn’t letting go, fight like your life depends on it,” Mazzotti said. “Because it does.”
As for Merda, he is moving forward. “I thank God every day for giving me the opportunity to fight through that,” he said.
He said he feels great physically and is trying to resume work, possibly as a motivational speaker. He said he was fitted for a prosthetic arm Wednesday and is ready to learn how to use the hook that will be at the end of it.
He also said he had a new respect for his own resilience and admitted to feeling somewhat fearless — almost to a fault.
“Fear is a good thing,” he said.