KATY, Texas — Courageous neighbors are credited with saving a woman’s life after she said four dogs attacked her in her own front yard. 

Kristi Burrell told KHOU 11 that the terrifying ordeal happened Friday night when the dogs jumped over her fence near FM 2855 in Katy. 

“They started biting my legs and I was screaming, and I was thrashing and hitting and trying to stop them,” Burrell said in a story you’ll see only on KHOU 11. “And that’s when I felt them grab my head, and they started pulling me apart like tug-of-war … and I could feel them ripping my scalp off.”

Burrell’s father said she curled into a ball to protect her face and vital organs.

“Several of them then started in on her back, buttocks and arms while one commenced ripping into the top of her head, almost tearing her scalp completely off,” John Hesseltine wrote in an email to KHOU 11.

Neighbors heard her screaming and ran to help. 

“My neighbor saved me. She jumped the fence and covered my body with her own,” Burrell said. “My 9-year-old son had to call 911 while I [laid] on the ground, bleeding from all the injuries.”

Another neighbor came out with a gun and stopped the attack, killing two of the dogs, according to Hesseltine. 

The other two were euthanized on Monday at the owner’s request, according to the Waller County Sheriff’s Office. 

Burrell had to be airlifted to Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston for “lifesaving intervention.”

“My daughter received bites and tears over the majority of her body, severing through muscle and ligaments all the way to the bone on several areas,” Hesseltine told KHOU 11. “This is by FAR the most horrific dog attack I’ve ever seen. … I’ve seen pictures of people that survived bear attacks that didn’t look this bad.”

Many of the photos of her injuries are too graphic to share.

Burrell is now recovering at home, but her dad said she’s in “excruciating” pain and often wakes up screaming because of nightmares.

The traumatic incident has also left him shaken.

“When we first talked on the phone while crying, she says to me, “Daddy, they tore me up. They tore me up really bad,'” Hesseltine told KHOU 11. “And when I first got here, through the tears, she said, ‘They tried to eat me alive!'”

Hesseltine told KHOU 11 that his daughter was familiar with the neighbor’s dogs and had even petted and hugged them in the past.  

“She may never recover from the mental scars this incident will leave on her,” he said. “I doubt that she will ever be the same kind, gentle soul that tried so hard to be kind and rescued so many animals herself.”

The family has started a GoFundMe.com account to help with medical bills, including extensive physical therapy.

The owner of the dogs faces eight citations, four each for failure to restrain and failure to provide proof of rabies vaccinations.