'Better me than her': Brave father gets bitten by snake while trying to save young daughter
MURRAYLANDS, AUSTRALIA: A father to a young daughter is now hospitalized after he got bit while trying to protect his little girl from a snake. Jake Coombe from Tailem Bend, South Australia, said it was instinctive for him to try and save his child, Alba, 2, when he saw something unusual move towards her. Coombe said, “She was carrying a fishing reel and I saw her drop it and run for something and I looked over and I saw something flare up at her.”
Coombe recalled that he ran over to his daughter’s side and took her away, but was attacked in the process. “So I ran over and grabbed her, it flared up and got me,” he said. The father-daughter duo had just returned home from a vacation when the attack happened. “I knew there was a chance (of being bitten) but I couldn’t risk letting my daughter cop the bite,” Coombe said, adding it took him a while to understand the extent of his injury because he was completely focused on taking his daughter to safety.
READ MORE
BOY BITES SNAKE! Cobra dies after 8-year-old chomps down on it when it coils around his arm
‘Better me than her’
Coombe said he had to stay the night at the hospital to be kept under observation. “I stayed overnight in the hospital, luckily it was a dry bite but maybe it would have been a different story if Alba got to it – she could have picked it up and wouldn’t have got away so quickly,” he said. However, despite the injuries, the man was glad to have saved his daughter.“Better me than her, that’s for sure,” he said.
‘A shock’: Coombe’s father-in-law opens up
While the father protected the child, it was her grandfather who spotted the snake first. “I keep thinking about what would have happened to my daughter if I didn’t see it,” he said, according to 7News. Coombe’s father-in-law, who alerted him to the presence of the snake, said that living in the area made snake-spotting a regular occurrence, but that it was still “a shock” for it to be that close.