Swimmer attacked by shark at San Onofre 'fighting for her life'

San Diego Union-Tribune

April 30, 2017 5:55 PM PT

A woman who was attacked by a shark while swimming at a popular surf spot off Camp Pendleton’s San Onofre beach is “fighting for her life,” her mother wrote Sunday.

Leeanne Ericson was in the water off a beach dubbed “Church” when she was bitten on her thigh about 6:30 p.m. Saturday. Bystanders helped pull her to shore and stanch the bleeding until she could be airlifted to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, authorities said.

Christine McKnerney Leidle wrote on a GoFundMe page that her daughter is expected to undergo several surgeries and that her recovery will be lengthy.

“She is a single mom with three young children who depend on her,” McKnerney Leidle wrote. “She has a long (road) ahead...”

Ericson, 35, resides in Vista, according to public records.

The beach was closed in the wake of the attack, and California state park officials and Marine Corps commanders appear poised to extend the ban.

“We’ve closed the beaches in the geographic proximity to the attack,” said Todd Lewis, the Central Sector Superintendent for the California State Park’s Orange Coast District. “It appears that the life guards at Camp Pendleton are recommending that the beach remain closed for another 24 hours. If they make that final determination, we will follow suit.”

That would mean no swimming, surfing or diving along the coast about a mile north and south of San Onofre Beach.

Lewis said that both Camp Pendleton’s commanders and state officials follow similar policies whenever there are verified reports of “aggressive behavior or an attack” by a shark.

Camp Pendleton posted guards on Sunday to bar visitors from the water, with lifeguards from Marine Corps Community Services on the scene as well.

Marine Corps spokeswoman Lt. Abigail Peterson said commanders would use the official Twitter account on Sunday evening to announce a decision on whether to keep the beach closed or to reopen it.

Surfline’s webcams have caught great white sharks breaching waves in the area over the past month, including footage of a predator arcing into the air near Lower Trestles in Orange County.

Although there have been numerous human encounters with predator fish in San Diego County over the past seven decades, San Onofre’s attack was only the 11th violent incident recorded in the area.

The last fatal shark attack in San Diego County was in 2010, when retired veterinarian David Martin, 66, was killed by a great white shark while on a triathlon training swim off Fletcher Cove.

Although the state officially has closed the beaches flanking the “Church” section of the shoreline, at 5 p.m. on Sunday 14 surfers bobbed on the waves about five football fields away from where the Saturday attack occurred.

Multiple surfers told The Union-Tribune that the state does not enforce the ban and those taking to the water do so at their own risk. San Clemente’s Dominic DeSantis, 54, stood on the sand, scanning the sun-dappled sea for the telltale launch of a shark.

“If you see it, you just don’t go out,” said DeSantis. “It’s kind of like you have to see it to verify it. If you didn’t see it, it never happened. That’s the way pretty much everybody thinks.:

With 43 years spent riding San Onofre’s waves, DeSantis said sharks sightings have grown in frequency over the past three years.

“They’re jumping out of the water,” said DeSantis, pointing south toward the coast along San Onofre State Park’s nature trails. “Two, three Friday nights ago, I saw one breach. I thought, ‘Oh. OK.’ And then I went out surfing. The waves were really good.”

Shark experts say that what DeSantis and his fellow surfers are seeing isn’t unusual. Attacks have increased since the turn of this century, as a result of growing shark populations and rising numbers of swimmers, surfers and divers said Ralph Collier, president of the Shark Research Committee, a non-profit research organization that tracks shark attacks on the West Coast and director of the Global Shark Attack File in Princeton, New Jersey.

There were 108 shark attacks on the Pacific Coast between 1926 and 1999, he said. The rate dramatically increased after that, however, with 95 attacks in just the last 17 years.

Marine protections such as stricter gillnet regulations have reduced the number of sharks accidentally caught by fishing boats, contributing to rising shark numbers as more visitors flocked to the ocean.

“When you increase the population of the ocean user groups, and you increase the population of sharks, you increase the possibility that there is going to be an interaction between them,” Collier said.

Newborn, juvenile and sub-adult white sharks often frequent shallow waters where they can easily find prey, he said. Soaring numbers of seals and sea lions also draw the sharks toward shore, where people are playing in the waves, he said.

Collier counts five attacks at San Onofre since 2004 but the sharks glide unseen among surfers and paddle boarders there on a nearly daily basis.

“I ventured to San Onofre in 2004, spent a number of days looking down from cliff,” Collier said. “I watched white sharks swimming among, between and below surfers, and they never even knew they were there. It’s not like every time they are around a human they’re going to bite them.”

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