Jess Hardiman
Shocking footage shows the moment a fisherman lost his pinky finger to a shark, who later had to be airlifted to hospital to get it reattached. WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC FOOTAGE.
Florida fisherman Brett Reeder was on an angling excursion in Content Keys, a few miles south of Miami, when he caught a shark.
Leaning down to unhook it from his line, the shark suddenly latched itself onto his pinky finger and ‘started twisting’.
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As the shark’s mouth rapidly became smeared with blood, Reeder could be heard exclaiming: “Damnit! F**k! It got my God damn pinky! F**k!”
Despite the expletives, he seemed relatively calm considering a shark had just robbed him of a digit.
Commenting on the footage – which was originally shared by Reeder’s wife Mandy on TikTok, before being reposted by user @ogeelashs, where it racked up more than 18 million views – one person noted: “Bro act like he just dropped his phone in the water.”
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Another wrote: “Omg. He's said it like nothing ‘I just lost my damn pinky'.”
In a follow-up video, Reeder revealed that he had to be airlifted to hospital – though not before having to drive the boat 25 minutes back to shore himself while his wife calmed the kids down.
Explaining how the family had been out shark fishing at Content Keys and caught their last shark of the day, he recalled: “I tried to get a hold of him to get my hook back and got unlucky when he spun around caught the top of my hand, and got my pinky and started twisting.
“And I could’ve sworn I heard a pop, that’s when everybody heard me say ‘I lost my God damn finger’.
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Reeder continued: “I got really lucky that I had my cousin with us that got a tourniquet on my arm.
“And my wife Mandy, she had a hard time calming the kids down, but we finally got them calmed down and started heading back.”
Wife Mandy then chipped in: “And he drove all the way back to the dock – like, 25 minutes – and I was right here on standby just waiting for him to just fall out at any minute.
“But we got there. The ambulance was waiting on us, they had an awesome trauma team. They decided right then and there whether they needed to heli-flight him to Miami or not and they decided it was best because of the pinky area.”
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Reeder said he was given a unit of blood on the helicopter after his blood pressure ‘dropped’.
"They started scrambling around in the helicopter giving me blood and I kind of freaked out a little bit,” he said.
“But they got me to Jackson South in Miami and they rolled me in and got me in surgery about 10.30.
“We’ll find out tomorrow at 4pm whether there’s a pinky or not, so... Stay tuned.”