Slidell boy's courage recounted

A trip to a swimming hole on a hot summer day quickly turned into a nightmare for a Slidell boy who was brutally attacked by an alligator Wednesday.

It happened around 3 p.m. at a retention pond in Slidell’s Kingspoint neighborhood. Eleven-year-old Devin Funck was swimming with three friends when the gator struck, taking the boy’s arm off at the shoulder.

The children managed to get their friend to shore, then raced to the nearest telephone to call 911.

Roszelma Joseph was sitting on the back patio of her son’s house about 100 yards from the pond when she heard the two girls yelling at her from the top of the levee.

“They were yelling, ‘call 911, the gator got him and took his arm off’,” Joseph said.

Fortunately, Joseph’s son is a officer with the New Orleans Police Department and her daughter –in-law is a trooper with the Louisiana State Police. They both contacted St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s deputies, stationed nearby as part of Operation Safe Streets, and were able to respond within minutes.

Joseph could not get to the kids on the levee because of a large drainage ditch that runs parallel to the levee and her house. As she tried to calm the girls down, She saw Devin and a male friend walking on the levee toward her house.

“He was walking like a zombie,” Joseph said.

She yelled at him to sit down because of all the blood coming from his severed arm. “At first I thought he was wearing a red shirt, there was so much blood,” she said.

She said she could see the injury and that the alligator’s bite had torn off part of Devin’s shoulder.

Joseph finally convinced Devin to sit down on the levee to wait for emergency personnel.

A locked gate blocked an access road leading to the pond, however, forcing deputies to run about a mile and a half to reach the boy.

The boy was conscious and able to speak when the deputies reached him.

“He said he was thirsty and asked for a drink of water,” said George Bonnett, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office.

“He kept saying, ‘I’m getting weak,’” Joseph recalled.

While they waited for deputies and EMS personnel, Joseph tried to call Devin’s mother but only got an answering machine. She finally got in touch with the mother of Devin’s friend to inform her of the incident.

Joseph said Devin was calm and that because he walked so far, may have saved his own life.

“He was very courageous,” Joseph said. “He did a good job and saved himself.”

Devin was taken to Slidell Memorial Hospital then flown to Ochsner Foundation Hospital in Metairie. Surgery to reattach the boy’s arm started around 7 p.m.

However, it was learned Thursday morning that surgeons were not able to reattach the boy’s arm. By 11 a.m. Ochsner officials had instituted a press blackout on Devin’s condition and asked that the Funcks not be bothered for the time being.

In a statement released Thursday morning, Ochsner officials said, “They (the Funck family) ask that the media respect the family and friends’ privacy during this difficult time. In the coming days they may reach out to contact the media/public.”

Ochsner officials said they were working on releasing a statement on Devin’s condition later in the day.

However, by mid afternoon a hospital official said the family was adament about not releasing any information.

The gator that attacked Devin was estimated to be nearly 11 feet long and weigh close to 600 ponds. Wildlife and Fisheries officials estimate the alligator was between 25 and 30 years old. It was reportedly a regular fixture at the pond and had been nicknamed “Big Joe” by area residents.

After Devin was taken to the hospital, the focus then shifted to retrieving the boy’s arm. U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials and members of St. Tammany Fire District 1 assisted the sheriff’s Special Operations division on the scene. Deputy 1st Class Howard McCrea, a wildlife specialist with the parish, was also on hand, directing efforts to capture the animal.

According to Bonnett, the beast did not go quietly, and it took 10 shots from both a high-powered rifle and a .45 mm semi-automatic pistol to finally bring it down around 5:30 p.m.

“They got it on the line right away, but it just kept jumping out of the water and charging,” said Bonnett. “It was a hell of a fight.”

Bonnett said Detectives Ben Godwin and Gordon Summerlin had to be hospitalized for heat exhaustion after the alligator was captured and shot.

Wildlife officials cut the gator open and recovered the arm, putting it on ice and rushing it to the hospital. Devin was then airlifted to Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans.

McCrea, who has spent his entire life tracking and wrangling alligators, said that while he spends most of his time in the Slidell area rounding up the creatures, this is the first actual attack.

“The last incident I can recall is a guy getting his finger bitten off when he was feeding a gator,” said McCrea. “These are very territorial animals, and as we move more and more into their territory, the greater the risks of something like this happening.”

McCrea noted that the area’s alligator population has experienced a huge surge in the last three years.

The influx of salt water to area waterways following Hurricane Katrina killed off about 50 percent of the local alligator population.

“Alligators are not tolerant of salt water,” said Byron Fortier, supervisory park ranger with the Southeast Louisiana Refuges, which monitors nesting in the region’s eight wildlife refuges. “As salt levels return to normal, they begin to repopulate.”

Fortier reported that in 2007 there was a 20 percent increase in alligator nesting in Bayou Savage alone as opposed to 2006, when there was zero nesting.

That was confirmed by Joseph. Her son’s house sits right on the edge of another pond. She said alligators come into that pond all the time through the drainage ditch, and even climb into the back yard and sit by her grandchildren’s swing set. She is always on the alert to make sure the children nor her son’s dog are not in danger.

When she first saw Devin and his friends walking to the pond, Joseph said she wanted to warn them about the alligators, but they were too far away.

Hunted nearly to extinction in the early 1960s, the state outlawed the hunting of alligators completely in 1962. Ten years later, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries instituted an alligator management program, designed to help restore the population.

The program has now evolved into a harvesting operation that incorporates a nuisance alligator division. It employs 65 licensed trappers who respond to complaints that alligators are too close to people or pets. Gators 4 feet and under are taken further out into the wilderness and released, while the handling of larger ones is left up to the discretion of the agent.

As development encroaches onto the wetlands, the chance of encountering an alligator becomes more and more likely. Still, Department of Wildlife & Fisheries press secretary Bo Boehringer reports that since 1966, there have only been a dozen attacks in the entire state, with none of them fatal.

“People just need to give them a wide berth,” said Boehringer. “Don’t feed them, don’t tease them, and in most instances there will be no problem.”

Even though there is a gate on the top of the levee that leads to the pond with a big sign warning people not to come in, Joseph said she sees people walking on the levee all the time. When she sees people in bathing suits, she gets very alarmed.

“There should be big signs on that pond that say ‘Beware of Alligators,’” Joseph said.