Just four months into recovery from a fractured spine, Rockport resident Rachel Kelly-McKee was stung more than 300 times by Africanized bees at a local storage facility. Surveillance video captured by a camera at Goose Island Park Storage on Saturday, Aug. 15, shows Kelly-McKee in her storage unit with her German shepherd, Chelsea. Kelly-McKee says Chelsea loves to come out to the units with her, but right by Chelsea is the tree that over 300 bees came out of. Kelly-McKee says it could have been Chelsea that provoked the bees. “She came in and I noticed she had a few, a few bees on her and so I said. You know, I thought they were honeybees. I said, don’t bring the bees in here, you know,” Kelly-McKee said. But it was more than just a few bees. “The minute we cleared that door, I was just absolutely inundated. And so she ran one way and I ran the other way. I ran all around here just swatting and trying to get them off of me and screaming,” Kelly-McKee said. An automatic gate at the storage facility stopped Kelly-McKee from being able to get away. The gate could only be activated by a car, not a person. The owner of the storage units opened the gate remotely when he saw what was happening. That is when Deputy Will Newsom of the Aransas County Sheriff’s Office and the Lamar Volunteer Fire Department arrived and sprung into action. “But my plan was to roll up. And get her into the back compartment of my car, and then extricate her from the scene and move her down to Lamar Fire Station where we could get medical attention. So once I got her there, I got her out of the car and I grabbed the hose and started hosing her down, and so she could start getting the rest of the bees out of there,” Newsom said. Without his quick action, the situation could have been fatal. “I mean, you know, just, I mean one bee sting can be fatal to some people. She took over 300 stings, which is definitely in the fatal range. So I, I knew that we had a limited amount of time to be able to get her out of the situation, get her to medical care,” Newsom said. Kelly-McKee says she is not looking to place blame. She says she just wants people to be aware of how to protect themselves.
