Toy helicopter bloodies Tampa girl

TAMPA - Maresa Poole says she walks through Gadsden Park in South Tampa just about every day. But last Friday was the first time the 17-year-old said she'd seen anybody there flying a radio-controlled helicopter.

The next thing Maresa knew, she'd been knocked to the ground by one of the aircraft and was bleeding horribly until paramedics arrived to help her.

We showed Maresa and her mom video of three men spotted by a FOX 13 photographer at the park. The men were carrying away radio-controlled planes and a helicopter after she'd been taken to the hospital.

We asked, does she think they aimed it at her?

"They kept on coming closer and closer to me," she said of the aircraft. "And I don't know if they meant to or not, and then I heard it go around me and then I heard it, like, gashing my ear."

"She has 17 staples in her head where the propeller hit her," explained her mother, Michelle Poole.

Her daughter's hand and arm were badly cut, and Poole says it took two hours for surgeons to reattach tendons and nerves after one of her fingers was nearly cut off.

"I'm angry," she continued. "I want to know who they were and why they did what they did and just left. They didn't even stay around to see if she was OK, or going to be OK."

Maresa said she doesn't remember much else, but thinks she heard some excuses before the men left.

"I remember them saying, 'The battery just died, we were trying to get it away from her, it just died and hit her.'"

Now Tampa police have opened an investigation. "Its really our duty and our obligation,", said spokeswoman Laura McElroy, "to find out if this is a freak accident or if a crime has occurred."

Police are asking anyone who was in Gadsden Park on the afternoon of Friday, April 16 to contact them if they have any information on what happened.

Maresa's family lives on base at MacDill Air Force Base. Her father is in the Air Force and is deployed to Turkey.