SURFER GETS EATEN BY A SHARK AND HIS LAST WORDS ARE “DUDE HELP ME!”
A 19-year-old Californian was fatally bitten by a shark while body-surfing in the waters off the coast of Vandenberg Air Force Base Friday.
The victim, Lucas Ransom, bled to death from the shark bite.
Ransom’s friend Matthew Garcia, witnessed the gruesome attack.
“When the shark hit him, he just said, ‘Help me, dude!’ He knew what was going on,” Garcia told The Associated Press.
“It was really fast. You just saw a red wave and this water is blue — as blue as it could ever be — and it was just red, the whole wave.”
When Garcia next saw his friend, he was close to death.
Ransom, a University of California, Santa Barbara junior, died shortly after being brought to the beach.
“He was just floating in the water. I flipped him over on his back and underhooked his arms. I was pressing on his chest and doing rescue breathing in the water,” Garcia said. “He was just kind of lifeless, just dead weight.”
Authorities closed down three beaches after the attack, which occurred 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Surf, Wall and Minutemen beaches in Central California will stay closed for 72 hours, a spokesman for the base said.
Garcia said the shark came out of nowhere.
“There was no sign, there was nothing,” he said. “We were just in perfect water.”
There have been multiple shark sightings in the past few years in the waters off Surf Beach, where the attack took place; a surfer narrowly escaped a Great White shark that bit his board in 2008.
Encounters with sharks, however, rarely prove fatal. The International Shark Attack File lists 61 attacks on human worlwide in 2009, only five of which resulted in death.
Stephen Howard Schafer, a 38-year-old kitesurfer, was the last fatality in U.S. waters after a fatal attack by a bull shark off the coast of Martin County, Fla., in February.
Source- Krackblog.com
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