On September 11, 2013, young 12-year-old Cameron Espinosa, an eighth-grader at Paul R. Haas Middle School in Corpus Christi, Texas, was halfway through a football game when an unexpected tragedy struck, a tragedy that no one saw coming.
After the first half of the game, the players were on the sidelines, warming up for the next half, when Espinosa suddenly screamed out in pain and fell to the ground, flailing at his legs. At first, it was unclear what the problem was and no one knew what to do, how to help him.
The source of this pain came from a mound of fire ants that had been inadvertently disturbed by the players. Their venomous sting inflicts immediate pain in the victim and the more ants there are, the more pain is inflicted. Cameron’s legs and now his hands were covered with them.
The coach tried to help by pouring water on the multitude of stinging ants swarming over him in an attempt to flush them away and ease the boy’s suffering, but young Cameron Espinosa continued to writhe in agony from the bites. Nothing helped, the paramedics were called but by the time they arrived he had slipped into anaphylactic shock.
This extreme reaction was unexpected by both his parents and his teachers as he wasn’t known for having any sort of allergy to ant bites. Unfortunately, the sting from a fire ant causes pus-filled blisters to flare up that have been known to induce hallucinations as well as adverse reactions within the nervous system.
Rushing him to the hospital, he was placed into an induced coma to help relieve the swelling on his brain. Due to the multitude of bites he had endured, his condition continued to deteriorate rapidly, however, and he was declared dead shortly after admittance on September 17.
Later, on further inspection of the football field, it was discovered that there were about 20 piles of ant hills infested with the venomous fire ants.
