Matthew Garcia was surfing two feet away from his friend who was body boarding when he heard a desperate cry for help. A shark raised out of the water and bit his friend’s leg and pulled him under in a cloud of blood off the coast of California north of Santa Barbara.
“When the shark hit him, he just said, ‘Help me, dude!’ He knew what was going on,” Mr. Garcia told the AP as he recounted his friend’s death. “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.”
As huge waves broke over his head, Mr. Garcia tried to find Lucas Ransom in the surf but couldn’t. He decided to get help, but turned around again as he was swimming to shore and saw Ransom’s red bodyboard pop up. Mr. Garcia swam to his friend and did chest compressions as he brought him to shore.
The 19-year-old already appeared dead and his leg was mauled, he said.
“He was just floating in the water. I flipped him over on his back and under-hooked his arms. I was pressing on his chest and doing rescue breathing in the water,” Mr. Garcia said. “He was just kind of lifeless, just dead weight.”
The University of California, Santa Barbara, junior had a severe wound to his left leg and died a short time later at Surf Beach, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. The beach, 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, is on the property of Vandenberg Air Force Base but is open to the public.
Sheriff’s deputies patrolled the coastline to search for Mr. Ransom’s missing leg but were only able to recover the bodyboard, which had a 1-foot segment on the side bitten off.
Federal and state Fish and Game officials were working to identify the type of shark that attacked Mr. Ransom.
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