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'I thought I was going to die' | 18 year-old recounts moment tiger attacked and nearly tore off her arm

Somer Stevens, 18, said her boyfriend saved her life. The next day, he proposed at her hospital bedside.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — An 18-year-old young woman said she will likely never regain full control of her right arm after a tiger attack at a Roane County big cat sanctuary last month.   

Somer Stevens, who worked and lived at Tiger Haven, recounted the minutes-long attack that occurred after she tripped and fell toward the tiger's cage. 

"It almost felt like I could feel my muscles ripping in half and I swear if he would’ve pulled it one more time, my arm would’ve been off of my body," she said. 

"The tiger had my whole arm in his mouth, I could feel the warmth of his stomach almost." 

Stevens said it happened when she tripped over debris near the cage and her hand slipped inside the fence toward the tiger, named Eeyore. 

"As soon as he got up my arm I knew that it was over, I thought I was going to die. If I wasn’t going to die, I was going to lose my arm," Stevens said. 

Stevens began screaming for help, but it took at least five minutes before a fellow employee, her boyfriend Gage, shoved a stalk of bamboo into the animal's mouth, forcing it to let her go. 

She credits him with saving her life—and plans to spend the rest of it with him. 

The day after the attack, Gage bought a ring and proposed to her at her hospital bedside at UT Medical Center. 

"If I have an arm, if I don’t have an arm, he still wants to be with me. He loves me. He’s here for me," Stevens said of the proposal.

A representative for Tiger Haven has not responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Road to recovery

Credit: WBIR
Somer Stevens at a February 17 interview in her lawyer's office.

Stevens spent two weeks in the hospital and said doctors gave her multiple skin grafts over the course of five surgeries. 

Her right arm remains bandaged and in a sling, weeks after the January 25 attack. 

"I’m doing okay, I’m struggling a lot trying to learn how to do things differently," she said. 

She said doctors expect it will take at least a year for her to regain feeling in her arm and perhaps longer to begin to do any basic movements. 

Her left ring finger remains bandaged from where she cut it while trying to pull herself out of the clutches of the big cat.

"We are really both we’re struggling right now," she said of her and her now-fiancé. "We’re both out of work and I’m not getting any workers compensation yet." 

More than a year after he answered a Craigslist ad for a job at the cat sanctuary, the pair still live on site. They're looking to move in the coming days and have set up a GoFundMe to help with medical expenses. 

Stevens said the tiger that attacked her, Eeyore, was moved to a different cage, but she believes he remains on the property. 

A sense of betrayal

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, a woman identified as Tiger Haven founder Mary Lynn Haven indicated to deputies she suspected Stevens was petting the animal. 

"She shouldn't have been over there,"  Haven said. 

"He was a hand-raised cat. I'm not saying he's tame, but he's friendly," she said. "She probably got away with it every day and then one day....it's play to them."

Later, in their hospital bed interview with Stevens, officers with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency posed the question directly: 

"No chance you stuck your arm in there?"

"No," Stevens said with a laugh, according to body camera footage. Then she added more strongly: "No!"

In her interview with 10News Wednesday, she said she felt betrayed by the accusation. 

"It’s not true at all. It really hurts me to know that as all this is happening to me, the thing on her mind is to try to twist the story," Stevens said. 

A longtime sanctuary

Tiger Haven, located about 30 miles west of Knoxville describes itself as a sanctuary and rescue facility for big cats. It opened in 1991 and said it does not breed the animals. 

In a 2020 interview with 10News, founder Mary Lynn Haven said the facility runs mostly on donations and is not open to the public. 

"People need to do it from their heart to take care of the animals. We're not here to entertain and neither is the animal," she said. "Most of these animals, they've earned the right to have their privacy."

Haven said her animals come from backyards, circuses, and cub-petting operations like the one described in the hit Netflix's show "Tiger King." 

Nine workers live on the property full-time and food comes in the form of a 40,000-pound truckload of beef every three weeks, but Haven said she runs a different sort of operation from the kind depicted in the show.  

"It's not a nine-to-five, it's a lifestyle for sure. But it doesn't have to be a bizarre lifestyle," she said.  

According to its website, Tiger Haven is currently home to 265 big cats, including tigers, lions, leopards, cougars, and jaguars. They also house 11 smaller cat species, which include serval, caracal, bobcat, and lynx.

Tiger Haven is licensed by the state to legally keep the animals. An employee told Roane County deputies in January that the facility had never before had a tiger attack.

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