13 WTHRHamilton Co. teen bitten by shark in South Carolina

Hamilton Co. teen bitten by shark in South Carolina

Jennie Runevitch/Eyewitness News

Charleston, S.C. - A Hamilton County teen is recovering after his summer vacation started with a shark attack.

Alex Stamm, 16, has 40 stitches and quite a survival story from his trip to Isle of Palms, South Carolina, near Charleston. He and his friend's family had originally planned to vacation in Florida, but because of the Gulf oil spill, went to South Carolina instead.

On his first day at the beach, the Westfield junior was attacked by a shark.

"We were, like, tossing the football around. It didn't bump into me. It just bit me straight on. I yelled," Stamm said. "My first reaction, I tried to hit it with my right hand and I saw the tail swim away. I just told my friend Christian to get out of the water and we all ran out. At first, I was kind of like bewildered, like what was going on and I saw the bite itself and I said, 'That's definitely a shark bite'."

Alex believes it was a sandbar shark, about four feet long, that left its mark on his leg. Right after the attack, his friend's family jumped into action.

"My friend's mom, she's a nurse, and she saw all the blood. Blood was gushing out of my leg. She got me on my back so I didn't go into shock," he said.

As Alex was loaded into an ambulance, his mom, hundreds of miles away in Indiana, got a phone call.

"He did tell my best friend when they were in the ambulance, be gentle with my mother. She's going to freak," Susan Stamm said. "So they were just very nonchalant. 'Susan, it was a beautiful day. We had a little glitch. Alex got bit by a shark. He's going to need a few stitches.' Forty stitches. That's not a few. It was 40 stitches."

Alex spent more than six hours at the hospital. He's now on pain medications and antibiotics, but Susan says he's in good spirits and plans to finish his vacation.

As a mom, though, Susan says being so far away from her son is tough.

"It was one millimeter away from his artery. That was hard. Last night, not being there, I couldn't sleep last night just wondering how this was all going to pan out," she said.

Now that she knows he's going to be okay, Susan can find some humor in what happened. She says it seems Alex's shark tales from the past are coming back to bite him now.

After a bike accident in Carmel last year, he told friends he got hurt wrestling a shark.

"Then this year he really did wrestle with a shark. He had to hit it to get it off his leg! I think he needs to be careful what he says," Stamm said.

And maybe, she says, where he swims.

"They were supposed to go deep sea fishing, but I think this was close enough," she said.