In the wake of the tragic death of a 2-year-old boy at a Disney resort in Florida, one New Hampshire man is reliving his own near-death experience with an alligator. Paul Santamaria, now 38, tellsWMUR he survived an alligator attack at Disney World decades earlier during a family trip to the park’s Fort Wilderness Resort.
"Under the water, where you couldn't see, there was an alligator," Santamaria, who was 8 years old at the time of the attack, said. "It came out of the water, knocked me down, grabbed my leg and started to throw me around and try to pull me into the water." After overcoming the shock of the encounter, Santamaria said he screamed for help from his 12-year-old sister and 10-year-old brother.
Santamaria, who says he was "lucky" to have survived the 1986 attack, managed to break free of the gator thanks to the help of his siblings. He was left with a tooth lodged in his teeth and gashes in his leg, leading to a week-long hospital stay in Orlando. "They had to leave the wounds open at first to make sure there was no infection," Santamaria told the New York Daily News Thursday. "Alligators' mouths are notoriously dirty. Then at the end of antibiotics, when they determined there was no infection, they decided to close me up and send me home."
Santamaria now has two kids of his own and was devastated to hear the news of the death of 2-year-old Lane Graves earlier this week. "This should be about concern for this family," he said. "A little boy was killed. A family lost a child."
Following the fatal incident, Disney has revamped its warning signs to specifically mention the presence of alligators and snakes. Signs posted at the time of the attack warned guests against playing or swimming near the resort's Seven Seas Lagoon but didn't make any specific mention of alligators.
"As a parent and a grandparent, my heart goes out to the Graves family during this time of devastating loss," Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement Wednesday. "My thoughts and prayers are with them, and I know everyone at Disney joins me in offering our deepest sympathies."
