A Florida couple returning home from a romantic date night stopped to help what they thought was a hit and run victim before discovering he had lost his arm to an alligator attack.
Ismael Rainey, 25, slammed on the brakes when he saw the man lying motionless on a jogging path next to Lake Monroe in Sanford.
He and partner Kendall Hardester jumped out of their car and ran over to help without a second thought.
‘It was probably around 1.30am in the morning, we were driving back home and passed by a guy, basically lying on the side here, covered in blood,’ Hardester said.
‘He was missing his arm from here; you could see his bone and all the flesh coming out of it.’
‘It was horrible,’ Kendall Hardester said, ‘At first I thought he got hit by a car or something’
Hardester tended to the wounded man pressing a towel hard on his injury
Investigators later identified the man as Dustin Crousser, 31, a homeless man who had decided to take a naked late-night swim in the alligator-infested waters.
‘I just ran over,’ Hardester told Fox35. ‘There was one little towel that he had, so I took it, covered his arm with it, and squeezed it till the paramedics got there.
‘I just squeezed his elbow area as tight as I could.’
Other passers-by stopped at the scene and called 911 while Hardester attended to the badly injured man.
Footage shows paramedics taking him on a stretcher away to hospital.
‘It was probably five minutes, then another guy got there, and he started helping me,’ Hardester said.
The brave young woman said she has no nursing experience but her motherly instincts kicked in.
‘It was horrible. At first I thought he got hit by a car or something,’ she explained.
‘Never would you think that it was a gator, especially at that time of night.
‘It was just a hectic situation, and if it were me, I would want someone to be there helping.’
Rainey said he had never imagined finding himself in such a situation.
Ismael Rainey said he never imagined finding himself the situation he found at Lake Monroe
Paramedics took the injured man to hospital in a critical but stable condition
‘Yeah, not something you’d ever expect, especially on a regular Saturday night, ending your night going home,’ he added.
‘You don’t expect to run into something like that.’
Crousser was taken to HCA Lake Monroe Hospital in a critical but stable condition.
What remained of his arm was later amputated from the elbow down.
Hardester said she would not hesitate to help again in future.
‘If I came across a situation like that again, yeah, I would,’ she said.