Shark attacks 6-year-old

Standing next to his 6-year-old daughter in waist-deep water Friday off Fripp Island, Craig Morris felt something softly nudge his leg. Seconds later, something pulled Ella under. That "something" was a shark, he said.

The 37-year-old father of three quickly pulled her to the surface. That's when he saw the blood and the 9-inch gash on the girl's leg, said Heidi Morris, Craig's wife and Ella's mother.

"He threw the Boogie Board they had been using (away) and squeezed her leg together," she said of the 1 p.m. incident near the Fripp Island Beach Club. "Then he carried her up the beach and booked it to the fire house. There was lots of blood. You could see her bone."

Paramedics treated Ella until an ambulance arrived and took her to Beaufort Memorial Hospital. It took 22 stitches to close the bite. Ella was released later that day, Heidi Morris said.

Emergency-room doctors told the family that Ella had been bitten by a shark that likely was small -- between four and five feet long, Heidi Morris said.