A 65-year-old man, Dr Thomas Smiley, died on Saturday after being bitten by a shark while swimming off Hawaii’s Maui Island near the Kaanapali Shores resort.
Maui Police spokesman Lt. Gregg Okamoto confirmed the identity of the victim to Hawaii News Now on Sunday.
Smiley, who was from California, was on holiday with his wife. He was swimming about 55 metres off the coast when he appeared to be in distress. Rescuers raced the man to shore on a jet ski and performed CPR, but the man, whose left leg had been lost in what appeared to be a shark bite, died.
Allison Keller a witness told the Hawaiian media, ‘He looked unconscious when they transferred him to the other gurney. As we got closer, I saw some blood on his stomach, and then I got looking a little bit more, and … it looked like the skin on his wrist was just torn off.’
‘And then I got looking closer, and his entire left leg from his knee down was just missing. There was no blood or anything.’
Also read: Surfer killed by shark off Reunion Island
According to Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources, which tracks shark attacks around its islands, six people were injured by sharks this year compared to three in 2018.
The last person killed by a shark off the coast of Hawaii was a snorkeler in April 2015, also off the coast of Maui.
‘In an island state that’s surrounded by water, human and shark conflicts do occur from time to time,’ Jason Redulla an official from Hawaii’s Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement told ABC News Radio.
The shark has not been identified, however there is speculation that it may have been a tiger shark.
Image credit: Wikipedia
