Body of Competitive Swimmer Apparently Attacked by Shark Recovered from California Shore

Emergency personnel in the Golden State have located the remains of a competitive athlete on a shoreline to the northwest of the city of Santa Cruz. This discovery comes almost a week after she went missing amid speculation that she was the victim of a shark.

The remains of the athlete were found on Saturday, as confirmed by her family members. Fox, 55, was part of a gathering of more than a dozen swimmers who set out from a coastal park near Monterey on December 21st, but she failed to return to dry land. An observer told officials that they saw a large shark with what looked like a person in its jaws emerge from the waves.

The tragic event and accounts of the predator garnered considerable concern and led to extensive attempts from rescue teams to find the missing woman. The following day, Fox’s husband and other fellow swimmers from her training community held a memorial walk along the beach path. Her dad described his daughter as an caring and kind woman who was passionate about swimming and had taken part in many endurance events, including the annual Alcatraz triathlon.

Authorities previously initiated a large-scale rescue mission involving numerous US Coast Guard teams along with personnel from area first responder agencies. The Coast Guard ended its mission for Fox after a 15-hour operation that scoured approximately dozens of miles of coastline.

California firefighters reported on Saturday that they had found a person on a beach near Davenport. The Santa Cruz county sheriff’s office issued a statement the same day, citing an active inquiry into the incident.

“This afternoon, at approximately two in the afternoon, a body was located in the ocean south of the beach. Because of the close proximity to the earlier marine predator case in the adjacent county, our department is working closely with the local authorities and the Pacific Grove Police Department regarding the discovery,” the release said.

An editor and friend, Sara Rubin, wrote about Fox as a friend and avid swimmer who found solace in the ocean. In her words that the triathlete and a friend began a tradition of weekly ocean swims at the point two decades ago. Rubin added that Fox never needed a book to tell her what she felt intuitively: that ocean swimming was a balm for her well-being, an exploration as much as a reflective practice.

Rubin said that her friend had developed a deeply intimate relationship with the ocean by swimming in it—repeatedly, on choppy days and gloriously calm days, logging what could only be estimated as thousands of miles.

Rubin also remarked that Fox “was aware of the dangers” of entering the water with a healthy number of predators, and would have disagreed with labeling it an attack. Instead people to view it as an incident—natural predator behavior is exactly that.

Even though many species of sharks inhabit the Pacific coast, attacks on humans are exceptionally infrequent. In the history leading up to this incident, there have been only a total of sixteen recorded deaths from sharks in the state in the past 75 years.