shark attacks zoo visitor, shark dies

Henry Zoo, Nebraska. Investigators, paramedics, and biologists are baffled by a successful lone shark attack at Henry Zoo, where the victim was first-time zoo visitor posing for a picture. No one else was hurt, not by the shark, and not by cuts via glass shards. A portion of the aquarium facilities though had to be shutdown for repairs.

"There was opportunity, the suspect is the murder weapon, but we can't file anything under 'motive,'" said Police Detective Andrew Rolls. "We're not giving up though; we're going to keep digging. Forensics will tell us more."

Survivor Mona Victorio sustained deep bite marks on her right shoulder when one portion of the aquarium glass shattered, shoving Mona down with the torrent-weight of salted water, and flooding the area to waist-level. The shark took this opportunity to attack.

"Don't look at me like that, the sharks are well-fed. And they don't attack people, contrary to the norm and what we see in the movies," said Henry Zoo Administrative Head Martha Anderson. "And I think it is sounder if we characterize this as just a freak incident, rather than an actual, premeditated attack. The victim wasn't even in the water!"

But Anderson may be wrong. Security camera footages and the sequence of images found in the victim's friend's digital camera document one particular shark closely following Mona's movements.

Allison McNaughey, visitor and witness to the attack, said that Mona let out a high-pitched scream, as though bird droppings fell on her newly shampooed hair. "She rose from the water and twisted," Allison said, "and walked backwards and slammed the shark against a nearby column. It was like, a basic self-defense move. I don't think she panicked, more like she was annoyed."

"It doesn't look much now," said biologist and Henry Zoo staff member Gordon Shumsky, referring to the crushed shark. She [Mona] must have been really pissed."

"Of course it was premeditated," said National Geographic Biologist Ameron Diaz. "The digital camera images show a pattern of stalking, which is characteristic of sharks when they have decided a prey is worth attacking."

"Hello! Like I would know what that shark would want with me. There were several of us near the glass wall posing," said shark victim Mona Victorio when a resident FBI agent started asking her questions. "But I do have a grandaunt that was attacked by shark and survived."

"That's it," said Detective Rolls. "We got motive."

"But that," cut in Zoo Admin Head Anderson, "doesn't explain why a bystander nearer to the protective glass than the victim was not attacked." Rolls and Anderson had been heatedly arguing in front of reporters, the shark victim, and the crushed shark.

"I think I can explain," said the biologist Diaz. "There's a theory that certain memories are passed on via genes, which is why cats try to scratch the marble floor in a gesture much like covering one's pee with dirt. Here, the first shark perpetrator survived, remembered the first victim's features, and passed on that hate. That shark you have in captivity, I am willing to bet, has its family traceable to the victim's homeland."

Meanwhile, a former-model turned paramedic treating Mona the victim said, "I don't really buy that genetic vendetta theory. The bites aren't that deep to suggest spite and malice."

"Sabi ko nga," said Mona in her vernacular language.

"What did you say?" asked six foot tall, tanned Mark Rosewater, a literature major who paid for his schooling by modeling, and then took up medical training.

"Oh hah? I said I was single," said a beaming Mona, not minding the multiple puncture wounds on her shoulder.

Authorities said the shark cadaver will be examined under close FBI scrutiny. Meanwhile, all sharks at the Henry Zoo are scheduled for scientific family tree mapping, to prevent and preempt further attacks to visitors.

the last bite

Jeremy saw past the daze in her eyes and stared at her pale and seawater-wrinkled fingers. A day and a half on a sinking lifeboat with Martin and no signs of rescue. At least the night and its endless darkness was over. She hated the dark.

Wonder just where this lazy current is taking them. Her wristwatch said half past three in the afternoon. Nothing to do but endure the boredom and hold out an inverted mineral water bottle, with its bottom knifed out, to catch in raindrops. Seawater dehydrates you more. So she and Martin split the accumulated drinking water evenly, and took turns holding it up. Hunger, dehydration, exhaustion, hopelessness, a shark. Jeremy wondered which would kill her first.

Above them, they sky was cloudy-bright, the kind of sky she looks at from her hammock on her apartment's terrace. She misses home, and her long afternoon siestas. "Tell me again," she wanted to ask Martin, "how your boat leaked to death on the way back to the harbor?" But she didn't Martin felt bad enough as it is. His plan to seduce her on his boat didn't work. And now it's life and death. How romantic.

A shark, Jeremy whispered to her self, to rock her back into reality. A shark would kill them. At least, she wished a shark would come. It if didn't come, at least it's something to think about. Better than the endless nothing she is enduring. Better than the thought of Martin raping her on an already sinking lifeboat.

Soon, night would come. So many things could happen. A shark might attack. Or the lifeboat might give out. Or a shark might come while the boat is collapsing. Or a shark might come while Martin is trying to rape her while the boat is sinking. How convenient, Jeremy thought.

She remembered a paraphrase of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Right, definitely, I'm sure, a shark would come.

Their lifeboat was a lung slowly deflating, a boat exhaling air; they took turns sticking their fingers into a hole on the boat's side; they kept checking themselves for open wounds that would lure in a shark.

They hardly talked. Martin said they should keep quiet, to conserve their strength, so they could scream and wave at a passing boat or airplane for however long it took to get noticed, to get rescued. But what if Martin got tired of conserving his strength, and wanted to spend it all on her?

The sound of motor in the sky. A plane. Martin screamed, forgot the hole and waved both arms. Jeremy blinked and joined the noise barrage. The hole hissed and hissed. The plane was gone. There was more water inside the lifeboat. The boat had gotten limp. The water bottle was nowhere in sight.

That's the second plane that missed them. Jeremy blinked at the coming darkness. So again, where is that shark, she asked herself.

Something in the water moved. Probably nothing. Probably the hunger and desperation setting in. A fin. Out of the water so suddenly. Twenty feet away. Coming to them, fast. Something surely is hungry. They are not the only desperate creatures at sea.

She pointed to the fin and Martin's voice was almost a silent screech, "We're dead." His throat must hurt from all that screaming.

"I'm not bleeding. Are you bleeding?"

"No," Martin said. "We have a flair gun, with one flair chambered."

"Save it. We can do this."

"Do what?"

"Sharks are sensitive not only to scent but to sound."

The fin swam closer. Fifteen feet.

"We yell it away? Are you nuts, Jeremy?"

"Do you trust me?"

"Just tell me what to do."

Ten feet away.

"Get you fingers out of the hole and pound the boat, open palm, and don't stop screaming."

"You're nuts, we'd hasten the deflation--"

Five feet.

"Do it!"

They do. They scream. The hole hisses air. The fin slows down.

"Don't stop, keep pounding, keep screaming, Martin!"

Martin barely blinked as he screamed. His throat was in pain. The shark turned to circle the lifeboat and Jeremy turned to face it, screaming and pounding. Their voice, in tandem, might just be enough.

The sun setting when the fin turned around and vanished in the silent waters. Jeremy plugged the hole with her fingers. But it was of no use. When the sun had set, more than half of the lifeboat was submerged. Both of them clung to the floating part, exhausted. Their throats hurt.

No sound rippled the sea. The blanket of darkness came. Jeremy hated the dark. No, she was afraid of it. Instead of her phobia killing her, there was another way. She bit her lip until it bled.

the last bout

Brandon Kowalski slowly pulled the white blanket toward himself, revealing his feet. He pulled some more and saw his bandaged right leg. Stitches lay underneath, he knew. He winced as he expected pain to shoot from the right side of his torso, where a thick pad kept in place by bandages covered more stitches. But there was no pain. His wince uncurled his 33-year-old angular face into wide-eyed wonder. "Morphine," he whispered in his mind.

He remembers punching sand-paperish skin while some 80 yards from the shore. "It" pulled away, leaving bleeding holes on his right leg. Brandon tried to hold on to his surfboard, which was now broken in two. The first bite had punctured his lungs with its upper jaw's teeth, the lower jaw's force cushioned by the surfboard. Brandon barely had time to curse. Wincing in pain, with internal bleeding setting in, he scissored his legs to keep afloat, and to look around: where is it? where is it now?

It came from his left side, his blindside, biting into his left arm. The waves separated surfer from surfboard as the six-footer repeatedly punched the twelve-foot shark's nose. It pulled away again. Adrenaline had dampened the wound-pains. He was trying again to scissor, to prepare for round four, but he had lost too much blood. The green-glistening water around him was now a murky crimson.

The humming of motor boats was getting near. With his head above-water, Brandon passed out. He did not see the shark fin rise some ten feet behind him. He did not hear the whish of the harpoon from the fishing boat that came to his rescue. He was unconscious as strong-armed fishermen, pulling him aboard, grunted under the strain of his dead weight. His bleeding bulk was on deck when the fishermen hauled onto the boat the other bleeding bulk from the sea.

Now, pain-numbed but awake, Brandon touched his left arm, where he had no feeling, and which he could not move. A knock on the door. His manager, Phil, took off his hat and stepped inside Room 312. Brandon closed his eyes and suddenly felt thirsty.

"From the fans," Phil said, gesturing to the flowers inside the room that Brandon had just noticed. Phil's alcoholic 58 year-old face wore the color of a dead man who rose from the morgue because he had a bet going down, and he wanted to know if he had won.

Phil walked to the table beside the bed. He picked up a ball of wet cotton and touched the bandaged man's lips with it. Due to massive blood loss and internal wounds, Brandon was still not allowed to drink large amounts of water. So he sucked on cotton.

Brandon's manager put the cotton on the tray and wiped his hands on his crumpled coat. His lips and lungs ached for a cigarette.

"How bad is it?" Brandon whispered.

"Your days in the ring," Phil said while cupping his pockets for his second pack, "are over."

sticks and stones

The Mako shark is pound per pound the strongest shark there is. Although never reaching the length of the Great White, the Mako is the faster swimmer, and has a reputation of violently tugging at fishermen's hooks until either the line broke or the fisherman fell overboard. A small fishing boat, one story went, was attacked by the Mako they were trying to catch. It jumped right out of the water and into the boat, sending two of the three fishermen into the water. The shark landed on deck as the remaining fisherman's mind swiveled between panic and panic: to jump into the water, where there might be other sharks, or stay on deck and evade a wriggling 12-foot predator drowning in air, wildly trashing about, and rocking the boat.

Rescuers who came to the hysterical radio for help arrived five minutes later to find a silvery gray-blue corpse on deck. It had been dead a full three minutes, yet its tail continued to spasm and its jaws still twitched.

A report filed by the Coast Guard medic who talked to the fishermen who fell overboard said, "James Mathiessen, 34, truck driver by profession, was reported to have yelled in two directions, at the shark on deck, and in the direction of his friends in the water, at other sharks that might come by. John McMahon, 39, high school Physics teacher, and Mark Conneway, 32, car rental shop attendant, said that Mathiessen had yelled more at the shark that was never more than a foot away from him. He cursed it to the ends of the seas with all the insults he knew in his heart to be improper."

"We're thinking there's a correlation," Conneway said, with the dead shark fish-hooked and raised for display at the dock, where an awed audience stood. "James is undeniably more articulate than either of us [Mark]. I think that is what killed the shark and kept other sharks at bay."

"Our boat," McMahon, the other fisherman said, "is not a big one. If a Mako could jump right in and rock that boat hard, as it did, it could also flip itself overboard. But the more James screamed at it the less it struggled. It just writhed and withered and died.”

"I think," Mathiessen said, "I latched into every bad memory in my life and lashed it all on that thing, over and over. I feel lighter, somehow."

”We’re seriously thinking,” said Coast Guard Captain Harold Smith, “to require all fishing boats venturing the waters during shark-hunting season to have at least one very angry, very articulate person on board.”