Meet the Fla. Man Who Survived Days Lost in Swamp After Gator Took His Arm: 'I'm No Longer Afraid of Death'

Johnny Dodd Eric Merda

As survival stories go, Eric Merda's three-day odyssey spent fighting to stay alive in a Florida swamp after an alligator tore his arm off sets a new standard for human toughness.

"I've never been so scared in all my life," Merda tells PEOPLE. "I was in so much pain that I wanted to give up. Dying would have been so much easier."

Merda's nightmare started on the afternoon of July 17, when the 43-year-old Sarasota resident — who owns an irrigation and sprinkler company — found himself with some free time on his hands after completing a job.

While heading back home, he spotted a dirt road that he'd never been on and took off down it in his van before deciding to do some exploring on foot. Before long he was wandering through the dense overgrowth near the Manatee Fish Camp.

"I was having a good time out in the woods, getting cut up in the heavy brush," he says. "It probably doesn't sound fun to most people, but I'm a Florida boy."

After nearly three hours of exploring, Merda was thirsty and hopelessly lost. He eventually spotted his van on the other side of the two-square mile reservoir that he'd just spent hours bushwhacking around and decided to swim back to it.

Mark Wilson/Getty An alligator swims in this file image

Merda waded into the water fully clothed but made little progress and soon felt himself being pulled under by the weight of his heavy work clothes. After shedding his clothing, he continued his swim.

And that's when he had a sick feeling that something was following him. "I looked over," he recalls, "and was staring straight into the eyes of a gator that was just a couple feet from me. I tried swimming away from it, but the moment my right arm came out of the water it grabbed my forearm from the side."

The memory of what happened next is forever seared into Merda's brain. "I felt it latch onto my arm and then that gator pulled me underwater three times, trying to drown me, but I wrapped my left arm around it and just kept kicking my feet, trying to get to the surface of the water."

Gasping for air, Merda was yanked back under water one last time as the alligator attempted to violently spin its human victim — a maneuver known as a death roll — in an effort to dismember him.

The force of this final attack ripped his right arm off between his shoulder and elbow. "That gator swam off with my arm," says Merda. "The bone was sticking out, but it didn't hurt that bad at first, probably because of the shock."

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He gave up trying to reach his van and swam back to the overgrown shoreline using his good arm. Miraculously, his stump wasn't bleeding. Once he reached land, he fell asleep in the sawgrass.

When the sun rose the next morning, Merda spotted a tree and managed to pull himself up the trunk using one arm. He shouted and waved at the planes flying overhead but it did little good. "It felt like the swamp was holding me there," he says. "But I figured I could either stay there and probably die or try to get the hell out of there."

Because it seemed hopeless trying to push his way inland through the thorns and thick underbrush, he decided to head back to the water in an effort to wade around the overgrown shoreline and somehow find his way back to where he'd parked his van. At times he caught glimpses of the eyes of an alligator that appeared to be following him. "It would pop up out of the water, then disappear and reappear," he says. "It was pretty terrifying."

He stumbled upon a concrete pad by the shoreline and decided it would be better to sleep there than in the marsh. For the next two days he continued dragging himself through the thick vegetation, eating purple flowers and drinking the muck- and mud-filled swamp water as sharp thorns continually tore into his bare feet and flies buzzed around the mangled remains of his arm. "The pain in my feet almost took away the pain from my arm," he says.

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By the fourth day, Merda was running out of energy and dragging himself through the underbrush by grabbing onto the branches with his left hand. "I could barely move," he recalls. "I was running out of water to drink and everything around me was a wall of thorns. Every time a stick would poke at the open tissue on my wound I'd scream. I was pretty much screaming the whole time because of the pain."

Late in the afternoon of the fourth day Merda spotted an empty beer bottle and he instantly knew that he couldn't be far from civilization. Moments later, he peered through the thick foliage and spotted what appeared to be a man climbing into a truck.

"I started screaming but he couldn't hear me at first," he recalls. "I stumbled and ran toward him. He looked pretty surprised to see this buck-naked guy who was missing an arm waving at him."

Within minutes a helicopter arrived, and Merda, who had lost 15 lbs. during the ordeal, was flown to Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Doctors spent the next three weeks pumping him full of antibiotics while removing more bone and flesh from what remained of his infected limb.

"That gator did what it was instinctively supposed to do," Merda's girlfriend — who declined to give her name — tells PEOPLE. "But if anyone was gonna survive something like this, it would be Eric. He's very, very resilient."

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Days after his rescue, a trapper removed two alligators —one 6-feet long, the other 9-feet long — from the lake. "It could have been either one of them that attacked me," explains Merda. "With my luck, it was the 9-footer. God never gives me easy challenges."

Despite losing his arm, Merda is convinced that the four days he spent fighting to survive in a swamp "is one the best things that ever happened" to him. He hopes to one day parlay the experience into a career as a motivational speaker. "I'm no longer afraid of death," he says. "And I bless every day that I'm here."

As for his missing arm, Merda — who was recently fitted for a prosthetic — insists that "if I could talk to that gator I'd tell him, 'You can keep the arm. But give me my hand back.'"