Girl Mauled by Lion to Have 5th Operation to Repair Damaged Eye

Nearly a year after she was badly mauled by a mountain lion in an Orange County camping ground, 5-year-old Laura Michele Small will undergo a cornea transplant today in a fifth and possibly final attempt to save the sight in her right eye.

The operation will be performed at the Estelle Doney Eye Hospital in East Los Angeles, her father, Don Small of El Toro, said Saturday night. “We sure hope it works,” Small said. “She can’t have any more operations because of her blood problem.”

Laura contracted a blood disease, hypoplastic anemia, as a side effect of the quantity of antibiotics she received after the March 23 attack.

Small said that today’s operation was made possible after a cornea became available from a 22-year-old man. In previous operations on Laura’s eye, doctors have tried to reattach the retina, Small said.

Now “the retina is OK,” but “the trauma of those operations caused her cornea to become cloudy, so they have to replace that.” Her surgeon, Dr. Ronald Smith, is a specialist in corneal transplants, Small said.

On March 23, Laura and her family were strolling along a trail in Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park when the attack occurred.

She and her mother had waded into a shallow creek in search of tadpoles. The girl walked onto a bank to a small clearing and when her mother, Susan Mattern-Small, turned to look, she saw a mountain lion grab Laura by the head and run. Another hiker heard Mattern-Small’s cries for help and clubbed the mountain lion with a stick until it let go of the child.

The attack crushed part of Laura’s skull, left her right arm and leg paralyzed, damaged her right eye, left her unable to speak for more than a month and inflicted 50 cuts on her head and face.

Laura can walk and talk now, but the painful recovery process is far from over, her father said. Besides the cornea transplant, she still needs several more operations to repair her tear ducts, reattach tendons to her eyelids and repair her scarred face. “And she needs one to put a plate in her skull where she has a hole,” her father said.

Walking Better Now

Small said Laura is taking her difficult recovery in stride. “She’s holding up pretty good. She’s a tough little kid,” he said.

Laura has “regained some large motor skills, but she can’t move her fingers or hands and arms now very well,” Laura’s mother said. “She is walking better now.”

Seven months after Laura was attacked, another child, 6-year-old Justin Mellon of Huntington Beach, was mauled by a mountain lion in Caspers Park. Because of the two attacks, the park was closed. It reopened in January under new rules restricting sections of the park to children and other visitors.

Laura’s family was shocked when the second child was attacked. “It should never have happened to Laura and it should never have happened to this other boy,” Mattern-Small said last October, at the time of the second attack.