(Feb. 4) -- Multiple sharks attacked and killed a man off South Florida's Stuart Beach on Wednesday.
The Martin County Sheriff's Office said Stephen Schafer, 38, of Stuart, Fla., was kite surfing at around 4:15 p.m. when lifeguards spotted him struggling and hanging on to his board. Officials said when rescuers swam out to Schafer,
they found him encircled by sharks. The victim was rushed to shore but had already gone into cardiac arrest.
"When [paramedics] got there, they found a number of sharks in the water, and they found the victim had been bitten several times," Daniel Wouters of Martin County Fire Rescue told Florida's WBTF-TV.
Chris Shultz
Stephen Schafer was kite surfing off South Florida's Stuart Beach on Wednesday afternoon when he was attacked by multiple sharks. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Schafer was bleeding profusely, and despite attempts to revive him, he "just wasn't moving," a witness told WBTF. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
As reported by AOL News, fatal shark attacks, like the one that killed a Zimbabwean tourist in South Africa earlier this month, are rare occurrences. According to the Florida Program for Shark Research, of the 60 shark attacks reported globally last year, seven were fatal.
Still, Florida remains the unofficial shark bite capital of the world, accounting for 32 of the 60 attacks reported in 2009.
Most shark attacks are described as "investigatory," with a shark trying to determine whether an object is potential food, like a sea lion and or seal. But humans are "just not on their menu," noted shark expert Richard Collier told AOL News.
When sharks do lash out at humans in a predatory attack, as they may have in Schafer's case, they could be responding to a perceived threat to their territory, according to scientists.
Though he acknowledges that every fatal shark attack is a tragedy, Collier said shark attacks, while always sensational, should not worry avid swimmers and surfers.
"I would be more concerned about my drive to the beach, or stepping on a bottle on the shore, than my interaction with a shark," he said.
