'I’m kind of a big deal around here:' Teen embraces 'anchorman' nickname

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A freak boating accident left a 14-year-old Manatee County boy with an anchor lodged in his skull, and doctors call his survival story "one in a million."

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“I can’t believe I had an anchor in my head. Like, that’s pretty crazy," Caleb Bennett said. "My friends now call me the ‘Anchorman’ so that’s kind of cool. I’m kind of a big deal around here.”

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Caleb and his family love to fish on the Manatee River, and that's exactly what the teenager was doing when the accident happened. His parents, Kelli and Rick Bennett, were in the Bahamas celebrating their wedding anniversary when they got the call.

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“We just heard that there was a boating accident and that an anchor hit him in the head,” Rick said.

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“As soon as I got my hands on it, I kind of felt what it was, and I realized it was in my head pretty far. I just stayed calm. I told my friend, ‘Hey, you need to call 911 or I’m going to die,’” Caleb said.

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“We needed to take out a big piece of skull, try to take out the pieces of bone and whatever else he had in there from the anchor,” Luis Rodriguez, M.D., a pediatric neurological surgeon at Johns Hopkins, said. “And more important, give his brain space to swell because that’s what was going to happen.”

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“I’ve seen arrows through and through. I’ve seen bullets through and through. I’ve seen things like this, but I’ve never seen an anchor, number one, and number two, I’ve never seen anybody with an injury like that walk out of the hospital almost completely neurologically intact. That’s one in a million,” Dr. Rodriguez said.

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