Although sea lions are a common sight in Long Beach, California, attacks are rare, Gonzalo Medina of the Long Beach Fire Department told local outlets.

A 15-year-old was hospitalized with several cuts and scratches after she was attacked by a sea lion in Southern California during her junior lifeguard cadet trial, local media outlets reported.

Phoebe Beltran sustained several cuts on her right arm and had to be hospitalized after she was attacked by the marine animal Sunday in Long Beach, about 24 miles south of Los Angeles, NBC Los Angeles and KTLA5 reported. Long Beach Fire Department Capt. Jack Crabtree told ABC6 that Beltran, a junior lifeguard candidate, was out swimming during tryouts for the junior lifeguard cadet program’s 15-to-17-year-old age group around noon Sunday when the incident occurred. While she has since then been released from the hospital and has even returned to school, she said the encounter has left her shaken.

“I’ve been stung by a sting ray, pinched by crabs, bitten by tiny fish,” Beltran told NBC Los Angeles. “But a sea lion?”

‘Assumed the worst’

Beltran told KTLA5 she was in the water about 25 feet from shore during her junior lifeguard tryout and was in the final leg of her 1,000-yard swim when she suddenly felt an intense pain and “assumed the worst.”

“Out of nowhere, I feel something biting my arm,” Beltran said, per KTLA5. “I saw a shadow of it, and all I’m thinking is, ‘Please, don’t be a shark. Please, don’t take off my arm and please, don’t kill me.’”

Turns out a sea lion had bitten into her right arm, leaving her injured with bite marks and bruises.

“The first bite — I went under, and I just see the shadow, but I couldn’t make out what it was,” Beltran told NBC Los Angeles. “As I came up, I was way too scared to face it head-on. I’m screaming this way as it’s biting me over here and it finally let go.”

Encounter left Phoebe Beltran with bruises, scratches

As Beltran screamed for help, a team of lifeguards and her mother ran to her aid.

“I saw something come up, like a fin, and somebody yelled, ‘Shark,’” Phoebe’s mother Bibi Beltran told KTLA5. “We all rushed to the water and when I realized it was my daughter, that’s when I broke down.”

The attack left the teenager with several bites and scratches on her arm and hand, but fortunately, she escaped grave injuries and did not need advanced treatment, ABC6 said.

Sea lion attacks in Long Beach are virtually unheard of

Gonzalo Medina of the Long Beach Fire Department told NBC Los Angeles she’d never heard or seen anything like this before in her “25 years of service.”

While sea lions are a common sight in Long Beach, attacks are rare. Cases of sea lions sickened by toxic algae blooms have increased across Southern California, but it’s unclear if the animal that attacked Beltran was ill given it scampered away almost immediately, authorities told the media outlet.

Medina said a “potentially aggressive behavior” is “certainly a side effect of the acid” but that “there’s no way to tell.”

“What we do know is the sea lion was very agile, very fast,” Medina added, per NBC Los Angeles.

The Long Beach Fire Department and the Long Beach Fire Department Junior Lifeguard Program did not immediately respond when contacted by USA TODAY.

Explainer: What is a domoic acid event?

The California Wildlife Center in late February had advised beachgoers to avoid distressed sea lions in the Malibu area after suspicions that the sea lions were sickened by domoic acid, a toxin deadly to sea mammals, from a recent algal bloom.

“Though we have not confirmed the cause for these animals’ illness, their signs and the recent rains make the situation highly suspicious for domoic acid toxicity,” the center had said in a post on Instagram, warning beachgoers to not interact with the animals on the beach and instead contact their team for help with distressed animals.

Sickened animals may “lunge and bite without warning,” so the public needs to stay away, the Marine Mammal Care Center has warned.

Despite the frightening experience and injuries, Beltran remains undeterred, telling KTLA5 that she’s determined to get back in the water and redo her tryout which was canceled after the attack.

“I love the beach. I love the ocean. I love swimming,” Beltran told the TV station.

Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@gannett.com and follow her on X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.

A Eureka woman who nearly bled to death while miscarrying twins last year is suing the Catholic hospital chain that she claims refused her life-saving abortion care.

Anna Nusslock, a chiropractor who sued Providence St. Joseph Hospital Eureka and its parent companies in Humbolt Superior Court on Tuesday, said she hopes the action will force the company’s California hospitals to follow state law.

“The work that we’re doing is going to protect people today and it’s going to help people survive,” she said. “I’m hoping to hold the whole Providence healthcare system accountable.”

The hospital says it already complies with the law.

“The experience described in this lawsuit is deeply saddening and troubling,” a spokesperson for Providence South Division wrote in a statement. “We are fully committed to delivering care in accordance with federal and state law, as well as our mission as a faith-based organization. This includes providing emergency life-saving medical interventions that may result in indirect fetal death.”

The suit builds on a September action filed by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, accusing the hospital of violating the state’s emergency services law.

“There is an existing injunction in the attorney general’s case, but it’s only against the hospital and it is limited just to while the litigation is pending,” said K.M. Bell, senior litigation counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, which brought the lawsuit with Nusslock.

Tuesday’s suit seeks to make the injunction permanent and binding for all St. Joseph hospitals in California.

“I’ve been really surprised at how healing the process has been,” Nusslock said. “We need to be putting pressure on these hospitals.”

Nusslock and her husband had been trying for years for a baby when she got pregnant with twins in late 2023. After her water broke late last February, just 15 weeks into her pregnancy, she rushed to the emergency room fearing the worst.

Yet, despite clear signs Nusslock’s life was in peril and her twins could not survive, the ER’s attending physician told her she was not “sufficiently close to death,” to receive emergency abortion care, according to court papers.

“I remember saying to somebody, ‘But this is California!’” Nusslock recalled. “But it’s a technicality when the only hospital you can have a baby at won’t help you.”

On the advice of the St. Joseph emergency room doctor, a hemorrhaging Nusslock drove herself 12 miles to Mad River Community Hospital where both twins were delivered dead, one spontaneously and the second via an abortion procedure.

“‘If you try to drive [to UCSF], you will hemorrhage and die before you get to a place that can help you,’” the St. Joseph doctor told her, according to the suit.

In December, after Mad River closed its labor and delivery department, another woman sued the Eureka hospital, alleging she was denied similar care during three separate miscarriages.

In the first incident described in her claim, she traveled five and a half hours to San Francisco “in active labor” for help. The second time, she required two units of blood to recover from a preventable hemorrhage. In the third, she alleges she was left to deliver her dead baby into a hospital toilet.

The woman now suffers from post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression “from being denied care at the only major hospital—and now the only labor & delivery unit—in her county,” the suit said.

“Because Plaintiff desperately wants to have a baby, Providence St. Joseph is certainly the hospital where she will go for her next delivery,” the suit said.

The hospital has denied wrongdoing in court filings.

As American hospitals consolidate, an ever-growing number are now run by Catholic groups. According to the Catholic Hospital Association of the United States, one in seven patients in the U.S. receives care at one of their facilities. More than 15% of American babies are born in Catholic hospital delivery rooms.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the right to abortion in the 2022, about two dozen states restricted or outlawed the procedure, about half of them with narrow exceptions for life or death cases.

But Catholic hospitals in many abortion-protective states such as California also deny terminations in cases such as Nusslock’s.

“These refusals of care unfortunately are not new,” Bell said. “But the situation is more dire now post-Dobbs.”

Although St. Joseph’s agreed last fall to provide emergency abortion care, the hospital has since reversed course, seeking to have the state DOJ suit dismissed on the grounds that compliance infringes on its 1st Amendment right to religious freedom.

“SJH could not comply with such an order without forsaking its Catholic identity—the ultimate burden in a religious freedom case,” the motion said.

Bonta said the hospital was flouting the law.

“The stakes of this could not be clearer: having acknowledged that they have, and will continue to, violate a law which requires them to adequately care for patients experiencing life threatening medical emergencies, SJH now asks this Court to condone their conduct by dismissing this action,” the state wrote in opposition to the motion.

The court is set to rule on the issue May 15.

In the meantime, Nusslock said the hospital’s actions have stiffened her resolve.

“It felt cruel and it continues to feel cruel,” Nusslock said. “You’re placing this religious policy over my actual life.”