Sharks | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

as we're going down to the beach my parents decide to take my sister and I to you know one of those Beach shops
with Trinkets and just fun stuff and I remember picking out this new bathing suit it was bright
orange and red and I was so excited to wear it that day and my dad got this kind of dorky but cute Fisherman's hat
one of those floppy ones and we were just really excited to go to the beach this is Avery Lear check when she was
nine she and her parents went to a family reunion one fourth of July weekend in Wrightsville Beach North
Carolina so when we get down there my family there's about 40 of us you know aunts and uncles and second
cousins and people I've never met before or hadn't seen in a long time and so we
have this big family tent set up on the beach Avery lived in Northern California where
the water is very cold almost all year so this was going to be her first time really swimming in a warm ocean where
she could go in past her ankles and that day the current was really strong it was running parallel to the beach so
as you know our family group was swimming we would get pushed down the beach further away from the family tent
and where people were watching us and so every like 30 minutes or so somebody my dad or an uncle would call
all of us kids out of the water and we would walk back up the beach and start swimming you know in front of where our
family was um around four I had this really strange feeling that something was going to happen something
weird and it just felt really uneasy and and all day I had been having a great time
and so later in the day after five o'clock um my cousin and I there we had drifted
further away from the group um just because the current had been pulling us further down the shore
and so my dad started signaling to us to get out of the water and we were so far
down we couldn't really hear what he was saying but we you know he had been doing
this all day getting us out of the water so we could just be in front of the family
and so as my cousin and I and she's 10 and I'm nine we're getting out of the water
I just get hit really hard from behind on my right side I was only in about waist deep water
and I instantly knew that it was a shark like I can't people ask me all the time
to describe what it feels like and the only thing I've been able to say is it feels exactly like it looks like it
would feel and I I instantly knew I was being attacked and I needed to do something
and so the shark comes up again behind me and grabs the back of my leg and starts dragging me basically out to out
further to the ocean and I just reach around and start punching down with my right hand as hard as I could to try to
get it off and my arm slipped into its mouth a little bit you you're bark I was yeah I was trying to
hit it as hard as I absolutely could so I was hitting like forcing my arm down and behind me to hit to hit behind me
to get it off of my leg I had all of these teeth marks and um scrapes and my arm was Bloody up to
my for my pinky all the way down to halfway down my forearm um and at that point after I was hitting
it it let go and my Dad ran into the water and got me out and he actually took his
brand new Fisherman's hat off his head and he clamped it onto my legs to just try to hold everything in because there
was you know tendons and skin and blood everywhere and he just ran up the beach with me to our family tent
and when he put me down in the the lawn it was like one of those lounge chairs under our our family tent then that's
when all the lifeguards came over and um started doing compression wraps on my leg and
oh my gosh I will never forget this like 16 year old Surfer lifeguard dude was just like
does she have all her toes and I just remember just oh my gosh you know at that point I hadn't even
considered that I might not have my toes you know I didn't I couldn't really see
my leg at that point because I had wrapped it up and they checked and thankfully I do I do still have all my
toes my poor mother came by she she had been going to the bathroom at the time so she
missed she missed witnessing the actual attack but just came back to the aftermath and the blood everywhere and
she just was hysterical just started screaming what happened what happened and we you
know we all knew what happened it was pretty pretty obvious what had happened how big was the actual bite
so on my foot you can clearly see the shape of it came from the side so you can clearly see the shape of a sea like
a like a bite mark and you can see the teeth pattern really well on the top and the bottom of my foot and up my leg a
little bit and then where it grabs me on the back is where it it ripped out tendons and a lot of skin
an ambulance took her to Cape Fear Hospital the orthopedic surgeon on call was at a Fourth of July barbecue he
rushed to the hospital and Avery was in surgery for almost two hours her father says she got more than 80 stitches they
kept her overnight for observation and then Wrightsville police showed up and asked to look at her wounds two
people came and they foot extensively photographed my Shark wounds with like rulers and just asked me for like a
description and took information on you know the temperature of the water that day and
the weather and the time and that sort of thing and I didn't realize that that's how
shark attacks are treated did they find the offending shark so while I was on the beach before I had
been taken to the hospital they did send lifeguards to go look to see if they could find the shark and it was as soon
as I was out of the water it was gone they never found it foreign Avery was attacked in 2002 one
of 661 attacks around the world from the year 2000 to 2009. last year saw 88 shark attacks five of
which were fatal that's up very slightly from the average in the preceding five years
scientists attribute any increase in attacks over the decades to the fact that more of us are getting into the
ocean water sports have become much more popular and attacks often happen on holiday weekends when millions of people
are swimming shark attack a teenage boy recovering in the hospital tonight officials are
investigating two suspected shark attacks in Melbourne Beach Florida they believe the Sharks targeted two
beachgoers including a ten-year-old girl the first 9-1-1 call at 4 12 p.m Sunday
afternoon an hour and a half later a second victim two miles down the beach and all of it coming just days after
another shark attack 30 miles away new this morning a popular Beach on the big island of Hawaii is closed after a shark
attack it's the latest in a number of shocking shark attacks across the country but the thing is it can be hard to say
for sure how often people are attacked by sharks in some cases including Avery's a shark attack is reported as a
fish bite the day after Avery was attacked her family woke up to read about themselves
in the newspaper the headline was fish attack's child at beach they didn't understand they'd seen the
shark when they got home to California there was a letter waiting for them from a man
they didn't know the letter requested photographs of Avery's wounds and contained a list of
questions about what had happened what clothes they were wearing what good colors they might be what kind of
activities were being done by them or others nearby and so forth and so there's literally hundreds of
set questions that we ask of all the witnesses and just like in a police investigation when you get enough
information you can piece the thing together and get an accurate appraisal of how and why the attack occurred
this is George Burgess he's a shark bite investigator who studied thousands of attacks including
studying so-called serial killer sharks for 30 years he headed up something called the international shark attack
file I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal after looking at the photographs of Avery's injuries George Burgess sent an
email to the family he wrote I am sorry that you were not told the truth about your daughter's
injuries there's absolutely no doubt that a shark was involved the marks are classic shark injuries
the Wrightsville Beach police chief John Kerry later said that it was never the town's intention to keep Avery's attack
a secret in many communities local folks namely the politicians don't want to utter the word shark and Beach together
in one sentence because they're worried about loss of of visitors or tourism and
so sometimes the easiest route is to not acknowledge something as as sharp and to
blame it on something else the shark attack file was launched after World War II when they're said to be a lot of
shark attacks on U.S naval officers in 1945 the U.S naval ship Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine
900 men made it into the water alive they would wait four days for Rescue the first night sharks went after the
corpses of sailors who'd already died and then moved on to the living they were attracted to the blood in the
water and the sailors movements survivors tried to get away from the blood but they had nowhere to escape
by some estimates 150 men were killed by sharks the Office of Naval Research thought
they had to do something they hoped to develop and were willing to pay for some kind of effective shark repellent but
first they had to collect data the shark attack file was created with the goal of documenting attacks on a
global historical basis going all the way back to the 1500s when George Burgess joined the project
in 1988 he renamed it the international shark attack file today they're based at
the University of Florida um just like the police we want to get to the the witnesses as quickly as
possible because as as time goes on their their memories of the events or their perceptions of the events change
and and we're all human we tend to listen to people around us and so we begin to connect the dots ourselves and
our heads even if it's wrong and so what we think was an observation sometimes becomes our evaluation we look very
carefully at the environmental factors that were were present at the time of the attack the the salinity the water
temperature the tides the moon phase that's what kind of bathing suit you are wearing do you have tattoos were you
wearing nail polish what about a toe ring are you menstruating will you will you did you urinate in the water things
like that that might have been attracted to a shark do you try and keep track of
sharks that may be habitual attackers you know they it's it's it's highly unusual
um at the risk of offending some it's uh I I suspect it's be uh uh the human equivalent would be uh how many murders
occur in the United States and how many of them are done by serial killers and and a very small percentage of them
would be done by serial killers most of the murders of the United States are one-off events but he has been called in
to investigate a few uh about five or six years ago uh there were a series of bites in the Red Sea off the coast of of
Egypt and I went over there uh during the midst of that to help the Egyptian government try to cope with the problem
and my investigation there suggested that one individual shark was involved in at least
three or so of those or four of those incidents because we actually had photographic evidence of the attacking
shark and so we could follow it by the basis of its coloration pattern and other marks on his body so that was an
absolute proven one which was no longer speculation habitual attackers may be rare but they
get a lot of attention the movie Jaws was believed to be Loosely inspired by a series of attacks
during the summer of 1916 off the coast of New Jersey five people were attacked newspaper
accounts referred to the shark as a sea wolf and the Jersey man-eater President Woodrow Wilson got involved
and agreed to give federal aid to drive away all the Ferocious man-eating sharks
which have been making prey of bathers eventually an eight-foot great white shark was captured human remains were
found in its stomach when are people most often attacked we find that in studying shark attacks
that uh the most the patterns we see are reflective of human utilization patterns
rather than shark natural behavior in other words to get the a shark attack the obvious is that you have to have a
shark and a human together in the water at the same time well when do we as humans go into the water most of the
time we go in daylight hours and even predictably within the daylight hours from certain times to certain
times so we see that most shark attacks occur from about 10 o'clock in the morning to about four o'clock in the
afternoon and we even see that that there'll be declines in shark attacks at certain
hours so between 12 and 1 or 12 and 2 uh in the afternoon there's a decline in shark attacks uh why are the sharks
suddenly not hungry at that hour no it's because we as humans are and so that's time when we go get our lunch and so
there's less people in the water so uh most attacks do occur in daylight hours uh even though for many species of
sharks the preferred time for them to to go feeding is that Dusk and Dawn and during nighttime hours when they have a
competitive advantage over their prey and and can sense their prey in the Darkness
foreign [Laughter] [Music] no matter how scary sharks may seem to humans they're much more likely to be
killed by us than the other way around an estimated 100 million sharks are killed by commercial fishing every year
which means around 11 000 die every hour but George Burgess and his colleagues at
the international shark attack file understand that people are still really scared and try to reassure us with data
on how much more likely we are to be injured by pretty much anything else Home Improvement equipment falling off a
bicycle for instance in New York City in 1987 more than 8 000 people were bitten by
dogs and more than 1500 people were bitten by other people do you have any tips for people I mean
we can acknowledge that that the chance of being attacked by a shark is like the
chance of getting struck by lightning right I mean it's very rare but but what are some of the things that people could
be that could help in the event well there's lots of things we can do to reduce the risk of shark attack first of
all we can get an understanding of where shark attacks tend to be more common so
for instance uh uh in in the in the United States in in Florida uh we have more attacks than any or other place in
the in the country and in fact anywhere more in the world and so New Smyrna Beach has been dubbed the shark attack
capital of the world so if you're really concerned about um your chances of being bitten by a
shark you don't go into the water in New Smyrna Beach with the surfboard um so you know that's a matter of choice
now uh the the attacks are bites that occur there continue at the same rate that we've seen in years past because
the Surfers which have full knowledge of that this information choose to disregard it because they would rather
go surfing and take their chance and and go ahead and keep going and doing their
thing so just depends on how how worried you are as an individual of entering the
sea when you consider the literally hundreds of millions of people that enter the the water each year and
billions of human hours being spent in the water each year to think that only six people go into the water but don't
come back out because of sharks you get a pretty good feel for what your odds are as an individual of dying in the
mouth of a shark and it's it's pretty much inventesimal but that said if that's uh high on your mind probably you
want to go to the the YMCA pool instead is it a good idea to try to punch a shark that's trying to attack you uh
first of all if you see a a shark acting aggressively you should try to get out of the water if you can get out of the
water that solves the problem and and uh so my general recommendation for anyone
is to get out if you're in a situation that you have the capability to do so in other words if you're scuba diving
you can go down to the bottom and look for some sort of structure to hide against or behind generally speaking if
you can you can do that sharks will forget about you and move on but if you're not in in the situation
where you can get out of the water or hide then you're stuck in the mid-water column and you got to deal with it and
if a shark actually approaches uh my recommendation is to be aggressive to a shark they respect size and power so
show them how big you are by giving them a full body view of yourself um and and certainly uh I I think it's
it's positive to act aggressively towards them uh if one comes close the the tip of the snout is sensitive in
sharks and so if you can give them a bop to the the snout most of the times they'll Veer off
um it's best to do that if you can with an inanimate object if you've got something other than your hand because
uh keep in mind the nose is located just a little north of the mouth so if you you miss you're going to be putting your
hand into the mouth of the shark foreign punched a shark in the face and I survived I live I lived through a shark
attack um but I I also I I really disliked the idea of ruining the ocean for other
people I just think that sharks are doing what they're supposed to do and people get in
the way I I don't think sharks are malicious or intend to attack people so many people are terrified of sharks
you know can you can you understand that why are we so terrified of sharks when we know that shark attacks are actually
rather rare well of course as much as we as brilliant as we are and as cultured as we are and all that we're
still animals and we still probably have uh maybe some genetic hardwiring in there for wanting to look over our
shoulder from our caveman days when there were lions and bears and tigers and things that could could do us harm
on a regular basis so there may be just a little bit of that still in us and and
of course I I I make the parallel to uh how we probably all were his kids when we went to bed and the lights went out
and there was that unknown in the in the room the the monster under the bed or in
the closet and we see that monster whenever we enter the sea because we Bob at the water surface and we don't know
what's underneath us George Burgess retired in November but he 'll working on shark attacks writing
papers using the data he's collected over the years and he still gets calls from police departments all over the
world asking for his help with their investigations [Music] criminal is produced by Lauren Spore
Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers matild erfelino is our intern Julian Alexander makes original
illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at this iscriminal.com where on Facebook and
Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio
wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around special thanks to adzerk
for providing their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
[Music]

The U.S. Navy attempted to develop a shark attack repellant after many sailors were attacked during WWII. The first step was the formation of a “Shark Research Panel,” which led to what we have today: the International Shark Attack File. When someone is attacked by a shark, anywhere in the world, the investigation closely resembles police work. “We’re not reinventing the wheel. There’s been no shortage of trial and error that went into police investigations and what we do follows,” says George Burgess, the world’s foremost shark attack investigator.

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 88 originally published 5/4/2018 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-90-sharks-05-04-2018

Brief Summary

Avery Lear shares her harrowing shark attack story and insights from investigator George Burgess on shark behavior and safety.

Key points

Avery's Shark Attack. Avery recounts her terrifying experience of being attacked by a shark at the beach.
The Aftermath. Avery's family reacts to the shocking aftermath of the attack, including her injuries.
Understanding Shark Behavior. Experts discuss the rarity of shark attacks and why humans fear them.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I instantly knew I was being attacked.

Avery describes her immediate realization during the shark attack.

2:40WatchJan 11, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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