‘Don’t be mad at that shark.’ NC teen who survived attack is focus of new ABC special.
A North Carolina teenager who lost her leg in a shark attack last summer is the focus of a new Robin Roberts special airing this week on ABC.
Paige Winter of New Bern was 17 years old when she was bitten by a shark while swimming with family members in waist-deep water at Fort Macon State Park on Atlantic Beach in June 2019.
Her father, Charlie Winter, a paramedic firefighter, punched the shark repeatedly as he pulled Paige from its mouth and got her to shore. As she was being rescued, her skin gray from blood loss and her leg already “pretty much gone,” Charlie said Paige remained calm.
On the ambulance ride to the hospital, Paige told her dad, “Don’t be mad at that shark. It’s just a shark, doing its shark thing. Don’t be mad at it!”
That is your first clue that Paige Winter is no ordinary person.
Paige ended up losing her left leg and two fingers from her left hand. But she was cracking jokes for her dad’s hospital videos within hours of her amputation, and moving around with a walker within days.
“Joking about it has made it not quite as dark a place,” Paige says in “Shark Attack: The Paige Winter Story,” which airs at 10 p.m. Thursday on ABC.
“It has genuinely really helped me through this whole process. I feel like if I just sat down and moped about not having a leg, that would be more of a setback than it already was.”
Paige’s incredible progress over the past year is chronicled through video taken by her dad and by the ABC News crew. Robin Roberts visited Paige at Vidant Medical Center in Greenville about two weeks after the shark attack for the first of a series of interviews with her and her family, and with her doctors and a circle of friends.
Paige spent one month and one day in the hospital, and when it was time to be fitted for her prosthetic leg, she “wheeled into a leg appointment and walked out of it” — stunning everyone.
“What we’re witnessing does not happen,” the prosthetist says as Paige walks without holding rails. “Absolutely amazing.”
And she didn’t just return to high school that fall, she crushed her senior year, trying out for plays and running for Homecoming Queen.
Paige sometimes has down moments, but mostly, her outlook is remarkable. Her spirit is inspiring.
At the end of the special, Paige talks about her dreams for the future. And there’s no doubt she will crush that, too.
She wants to be an environmental activist, wants to save the ocean and marine life.
And she still wants people to not be mad at sharks.
“Sharks are very demonized,” Paige says. “They’re mostly docile creatures. They’re not monsters.”
Watch ‘Shark Attack: The Paige Winter Story’
“Shark Attack: The Paige Winter Story” airs at 10 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 10 on ABC.
This story was originally published September 8, 2020 at 3:02 PM.
