Mauled Mormon missionary has new lease on life after lions attack nearly two months ago in Guatemala

ST. GEORGE — He's missing a piece of his leg, his arm was recently amputated and the tendons in his thumb were torn from pressing so hard on his attacker's eyeball, but Elder Paul Richard Oakey said he plans to move on from a day that two lions almost took his life.

"Accidents happen. We don't plan them. They just happen," said the 20-year-old whose humility is visible from across a room. "I wasn't planning on getting attacked by lions. It happened and I'm just going to move on."

Oakey said that a group of missionaries from an area he was serving in, in the Guatemala City South Mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, decided to visit a zoo in the small mountain town of Esquipulas on July 11. The zoo, which charges an admission of five Quetzals (the equivalent of about 64 cents in the U.S.), boasts about a dozen different varieties of animals in cages at the top of a fairly steep hill that is accessible by a fairly lengthy hike.

It was their "preparation day," or a day off from full-time proselyting, and a chance to explore the culture and scenery of Guatemala.

After a monkey in a cage reached out and grabbed a camera from one of the missionaries, the group moved on to look on a pair of caged lions.

Oakey thought he could get a great picture of his colleagues from the other side of the cage, but had to scale a cement wall, just outside the back of the cage, to be at the same level as the other missionaries.

"I looked down at my camera and out of the corner of my eye, I see a lion coming around the corner real fast," he said. Oakey barely had time to react before the lion had grabbed hold of his right calf.

"I looked up and saw everyone and I just yelled for help," Oakey said, with signs of reliving the attack all over again escaping in his voice. "I put my arm up on the cage to start pulling away from that claw on my calf and a second lion got my arm and I was pinned to the fence."

"I was just pinned there — one lion on my calf, one lion on my arm — and I was just watching them playing with my arm."

All that Oakey could think to do was to punch one of the lions in the head repeatedly, but "that didn't work because its a lion and that doesn't hurt them," he said. "So I started gouging its eyeball out because that's the only thing I could do by myself to free myself."

Between the gouging, another elder trying to shove a pole in the lion's mouth and the zookeeper firing a gun into the air, one of the lions released Oakey's arm and he fell backwards, detained only by the other lion's tight grasp on his leg.