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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
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with Trinkets and just fun stuff and I remember picking out this new bathing suit it was bright
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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
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one of those floppy ones and we were just really excited to go to the beach this is Avery Lear check when she was
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nine she and her parents went to a family reunion one fourth of July weekend in Wrightsville Beach North
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Carolina so when we get down there my family there's about 40 of us you know aunts and uncles and second
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cousins and people I've never met before or hadn't seen in a long time and so we
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have this big family tent set up on the beach Avery lived in Northern California where
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the water is very cold almost all year so this was going to be her first time really swimming in a warm ocean where
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she could go in past her ankles and that day the current was really strong it was running parallel to the beach so
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as you know our family group was swimming we would get pushed down the beach further away from the family tent
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and where people were watching us and so every like 30 minutes or so somebody my dad or an uncle would call
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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
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family was um around four I had this really strange feeling that something was going to happen something
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weird and it just felt really uneasy and and all day I had been having a great time
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and so later in the day after five o'clock um my cousin and I there we had drifted
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further away from the group um just because the current had been pulling us further down the shore
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and so my dad started signaling to us to get out of the water and we were so far
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down we couldn't really hear what he was saying but we you know he had been doing
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this all day getting us out of the water so we could just be in front of the family
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and so as my cousin and I and she's 10 and I'm nine we're getting out of the water
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I just get hit really hard from behind on my right side I was only in about waist deep water
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and I instantly knew that it was a shark like I can't people ask me all the time
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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
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would feel and I I instantly knew I was being attacked and I needed to do something
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and so the shark comes up again behind me and grabs the back of my leg and starts dragging me basically out to out
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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
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get it off and my arm slipped into its mouth a little bit you you're bark I was yeah I was trying to
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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
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to get it off of my leg I had all of these teeth marks and um scrapes and my arm was Bloody up to
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my for my pinky all the way down to halfway down my forearm um and at that point after I was hitting
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it it let go and my Dad ran into the water and got me out and he actually took his
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brand new Fisherman's hat off his head and he clamped it onto my legs to just try to hold everything in because there
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was you know tendons and skin and blood everywhere and he just ran up the beach with me to our family tent
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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
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when all the lifeguards came over and um started doing compression wraps on my leg and
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oh my gosh I will never forget this like 16 year old Surfer lifeguard dude was just like
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does she have all her toes and I just remember just oh my gosh you know at that point I hadn't even
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considered that I might not have my toes you know I didn't I couldn't really see
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my leg at that point because I had wrapped it up and they checked and thankfully I do I do still have all my
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toes my poor mother came by she she had been going to the bathroom at the time so she
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missed she missed witnessing the actual attack but just came back to the aftermath and the blood everywhere and
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she just was hysterical just started screaming what happened what happened and we you
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know we all knew what happened it was pretty pretty obvious what had happened how big was the actual bite
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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
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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
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little bit and then where it grabs me on the back is where it it ripped out tendons and a lot of skin
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an ambulance took her to Cape Fear Hospital the orthopedic surgeon on call was at a Fourth of July barbecue he
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rushed to the hospital and Avery was in surgery for almost two hours her father says she got more than 80 stitches they
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kept her overnight for observation and then Wrightsville police showed up and asked to look at her wounds two
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people came and they foot extensively photographed my Shark wounds with like rulers and just asked me for like a
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description and took information on you know the temperature of the water that day and
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the weather and the time and that sort of thing and I didn't realize that that's how
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shark attacks are treated did they find the offending shark so while I was on the beach before I had
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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
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as I was out of the water it was gone they never found it foreign Avery was attacked in 2002 one
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of 661 attacks around the world from the year 2000 to 2009. last year saw 88 shark attacks five of
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which were fatal that's up very slightly from the average in the preceding five years
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scientists attribute any increase in attacks over the decades to the fact that more of us are getting into the
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ocean water sports have become much more popular and attacks often happen on holiday weekends when millions of people
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are swimming shark attack a teenage boy recovering in the hospital tonight officials are
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investigating two suspected shark attacks in Melbourne Beach Florida they believe the Sharks targeted two
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beachgoers including a ten-year-old girl the first 9-1-1 call at 4 12 p.m Sunday
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afternoon an hour and a half later a second victim two miles down the beach and all of it coming just days after
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another shark attack 30 miles away new this morning a popular Beach on the big island of Hawaii is closed after a shark
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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
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for sure how often people are attacked by sharks in some cases including Avery's a shark attack is reported as a
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fish bite the day after Avery was attacked her family woke up to read about themselves
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in the newspaper the headline was fish attack's child at beach they didn't understand they'd seen the
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shark when they got home to California there was a letter waiting for them from a man
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they didn't know the letter requested photographs of Avery's wounds and contained a list of
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questions about what had happened what clothes they were wearing what good colors they might be what kind of
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activities were being done by them or others nearby and so forth and so there's literally hundreds of
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set questions that we ask of all the witnesses and just like in a police investigation when you get enough
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information you can piece the thing together and get an accurate appraisal of how and why the attack occurred
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this is George Burgess he's a shark bite investigator who studied thousands of attacks including
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studying so-called serial killer sharks for 30 years he headed up something called the international shark attack
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file I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal after looking at the photographs of Avery's injuries George Burgess sent an
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email to the family he wrote I am sorry that you were not told the truth about your daughter's
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injuries there's absolutely no doubt that a shark was involved the marks are classic shark injuries
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the Wrightsville Beach police chief John Kerry later said that it was never the town's intention to keep Avery's attack
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a secret in many communities local folks namely the politicians don't want to utter the word shark and Beach together
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in one sentence because they're worried about loss of of visitors or tourism and
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so sometimes the easiest route is to not acknowledge something as as sharp and to
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blame it on something else the shark attack file was launched after World War II when they're said to be a lot of
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shark attacks on U.S naval officers in 1945 the U.S naval ship Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine
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900 men made it into the water alive they would wait four days for Rescue the first night sharks went after the
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corpses of sailors who'd already died and then moved on to the living they were attracted to the blood in the
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water and the sailors movements survivors tried to get away from the blood but they had nowhere to escape
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by some estimates 150 men were killed by sharks the Office of Naval Research thought
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they had to do something they hoped to develop and were willing to pay for some kind of effective shark repellent but
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first they had to collect data the shark attack file was created with the goal of documenting attacks on a
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global historical basis going all the way back to the 1500s when George Burgess joined the project
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in 1988 he renamed it the international shark attack file today they're based at
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the University of Florida um just like the police we want to get to the the witnesses as quickly as
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possible because as as time goes on their their memories of the events or their perceptions of the events change
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and and we're all human we tend to listen to people around us and so we begin to connect the dots ourselves and
00:12:13
our heads even if it's wrong and so what we think was an observation sometimes becomes our evaluation we look very
00:12:22
carefully at the environmental factors that were were present at the time of the attack the the salinity the water
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temperature the tides the moon phase that's what kind of bathing suit you are wearing do you have tattoos were you
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wearing nail polish what about a toe ring are you menstruating will you will you did you urinate in the water things
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like that that might have been attracted to a shark do you try and keep track of
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sharks that may be habitual attackers you know they it's it's it's highly unusual
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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
00:13:07
occur in the United States and how many of them are done by serial killers and and a very small percentage of them
00:13:14
would be done by serial killers most of the murders of the United States are one-off events but he has been called in
00:13:21
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
00:13:31
Egypt and I went over there uh during the midst of that to help the Egyptian government try to cope with the problem
00:13:38
and my investigation there suggested that one individual shark was involved in at least
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three or so of those or four of those incidents because we actually had photographic evidence of the attacking
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shark and so we could follow it by the basis of its coloration pattern and other marks on his body so that was an
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absolute proven one which was no longer speculation habitual attackers may be rare but they
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get a lot of attention the movie Jaws was believed to be Loosely inspired by a series of attacks
00:14:17
during the summer of 1916 off the coast of New Jersey five people were attacked newspaper
00:14:24
accounts referred to the shark as a sea wolf and the Jersey man-eater President Woodrow Wilson got involved
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and agreed to give federal aid to drive away all the Ferocious man-eating sharks
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which have been making prey of bathers eventually an eight-foot great white shark was captured human remains were
00:14:49
found in its stomach when are people most often attacked we find that in studying shark attacks
00:14:59
that uh the most the patterns we see are reflective of human utilization patterns
00:15:07
rather than shark natural behavior in other words to get the a shark attack the obvious is that you have to have a
00:15:17
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
00:15:23
time we go in daylight hours and even predictably within the daylight hours from certain times to certain
00:15:31
times so we see that most shark attacks occur from about 10 o'clock in the morning to about four o'clock in the
00:15:38
afternoon and we even see that that there'll be declines in shark attacks at certain
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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
00:15:54
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
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there's less people in the water so uh most attacks do occur in daylight hours uh even though for many species of
00:16:10
sharks the preferred time for them to to go feeding is that Dusk and Dawn and during nighttime hours when they have a
00:16:19
competitive advantage over their prey and and can sense their prey in the Darkness
00:16:25
foreign [Laughter] [Music] no matter how scary sharks may seem to humans they're much more likely to be
00:16:43
killed by us than the other way around an estimated 100 million sharks are killed by commercial fishing every year
00:16:50
which means around 11 000 die every hour but George Burgess and his colleagues at
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the international shark attack file understand that people are still really scared and try to reassure us with data
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on how much more likely we are to be injured by pretty much anything else Home Improvement equipment falling off a
00:17:12
bicycle for instance in New York City in 1987 more than 8 000 people were bitten by
00:17:19
dogs and more than 1500 people were bitten by other people do you have any tips for people I mean
00:17:28
we can acknowledge that that the chance of being attacked by a shark is like the
00:17:32
chance of getting struck by lightning right I mean it's very rare but but what are some of the things that people could
00:17:38
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
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all we can get an understanding of where shark attacks tend to be more common so
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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
00:18:03
the in the country and in fact anywhere more in the world and so New Smyrna Beach has been dubbed the shark attack
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capital of the world so if you're really concerned about um your chances of being bitten by a
00:18:18
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
00:18:26
now uh the the attacks are bites that occur there continue at the same rate that we've seen in years past because
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the Surfers which have full knowledge of that this information choose to disregard it because they would rather
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go surfing and take their chance and and go ahead and keep going and doing their
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thing so just depends on how how worried you are as an individual of entering the
00:18:51
sea when you consider the literally hundreds of millions of people that enter the the water each year and
00:18:59
billions of human hours being spent in the water each year to think that only six people go into the water but don't
00:19:07
come back out because of sharks you get a pretty good feel for what your odds are as an individual of dying in the
00:19:15
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
00:19:23
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
00:19:33
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
00:19:39
water that solves the problem and and uh so my general recommendation for anyone
00:19:45
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
00:19:53
you can go down to the bottom and look for some sort of structure to hide against or behind generally speaking if
00:19:59
you can you can do that sharks will forget about you and move on but if you're not in in the situation
00:20:06
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
00:20:12
if a shark actually approaches uh my recommendation is to be aggressive to a shark they respect size and power so
00:20:21
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
00:20:29
it's positive to act aggressively towards them uh if one comes close the the tip of the snout is sensitive in
00:20:37
sharks and so if you can give them a bop to the the snout most of the times they'll Veer off
00:20:44
um it's best to do that if you can with an inanimate object if you've got something other than your hand because
00:20:49
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
00:20:56
hand into the mouth of the shark foreign punched a shark in the face and I survived I live I lived through a shark
00:21:10
attack um but I I also I I really disliked the idea of ruining the ocean for other
00:21:17
people I just think that sharks are doing what they're supposed to do and people get in
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the way I I don't think sharks are malicious or intend to attack people so many people are terrified of sharks
00:21:34
you know can you can you understand that why are we so terrified of sharks when we know that shark attacks are actually
00:21:40
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
00:21:51
still animals and we still probably have uh maybe some genetic hardwiring in there for wanting to look over our
00:22:01
shoulder from our caveman days when there were lions and bears and tigers and things that could could do us harm
00:22:09
on a regular basis so there may be just a little bit of that still in us and and
00:22:15
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
00:22:24
and there was that unknown in the in the room the the monster under the bed or in
00:22:30
the closet and we see that monster whenever we enter the sea because we Bob at the water surface and we don't know
00:22:39
what's underneath us George Burgess retired in November but he 'll working on shark attacks writing
00:22:48
papers using the data he's collected over the years and he still gets calls from police departments all over the
00:22:56
world asking for his help with their investigations [Music] criminal is produced by Lauren Spore
00:23:14
Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers matild erfelino is our intern Julian Alexander makes original
00:23:23
illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at this iscriminal.com where on Facebook and
00:23:30
Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio
00:23:37
wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around special thanks to adzerk
00:23:47
for providing their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
00:23:54
[Music]