• Great white shark responsible for attack off Cape Cod, officials confirm

    By Louis Casiano, NBC News

    Marine officials in Massachusetts have confirmed that a great white shark attacked a man who was body surfing with his teenage son off the coast of Cape Cod last week.


    Chris Myers, 50, was attacked on July 30 off Ballston Beach in Truro, Mass., just after the dark silhouette of a shark emerged between him and his son. Myers and his 16-year-old son, J.J., had swum out to a sandbar about 400 to 500 feet from the beach when they decided to turn around and head back to shore.  

    Experts had suspected a great white shark was responsible for the attack but did not confirm it until Wednesday.

    Of the attack, Myers said the first thing he felt was the shark biting into his left foot.

    "It felt like I had my foot stuck in a refrigerator or a vise," he said last week from his hospital bed at Massachusetts General Hospital. "I knew instantly that it was a shark."

    The shark bit Myers on both his legs, leaving four puncture wounds; Myers responded by kicking the animal in the snout. Myers later underwent surgery to repair torn tendons, receiving 47 stitches to close the wounds. 

    He said he can now walk on crutches and can even take a few steps on his own.

    Greg Skomal, a marine biologist with the state Division of Marine Fisheries, and George Burgess of the International Shark File, an organization that tracks shark bites, determined a great white had bitten Myers based on an examination of the man's injuries and account of the incident.

    Skomal, the state's top shark expert, told The Associated Press that he thought the attack was the work of a great white, portrayed menacingly in the 1975 cult classic, "Jaws." Great whites are typically between 15 to 20 feet long and can weigh more than 5,000 pounds, according to National Geographic. The shark can detect just one drop of blood in 25 gallons of water and can sense the tiniest amount of blood in water for up to three miles.

    But contrary to popular belief, however, they don't roam the seas searching for humans to feast on.

    Skomal told the Boston Globe that Myers is the first person to attacked by a great white in Massachusetts since 1936, when a teenager was killed by one.

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    Skomal said the number of great white sightings off the Massachusetts coast is probably due to the growing number of seals. Great whites are known to feed on seals.

    Myers was released from the hospital Friday and plans to return home to Colorado next week. 

    "I feel very lucky to have made it back to that beach in one piece, very very lucky that my son did not get bitten and very thrilled that the two of us are going to get to go home today together," Myers said.

     

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    54 comments

    They are going to need a bigger boat.

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  • Man hospitalized after suspected shark attack off Cape Cod

    Chris Myers, who was swimming with his son, suffered severe lacerations to his legs and ankles in a suspected shark attack at Ballston Beach in Truro, Mass.

    By NBC News staff

    A man who was attacked by a suspected shark while body surfing with his son near Cape Cod is expected to live, officials say.


    The attack happened around 3:30 p.m. Monday when Chris Myers was body surfing and swimming with his teenage son off the coast of Ballston Beach, part of the Cape Cod National Seashore in Truro, Mass.

    Witnesses on the beach say they saw a dorsal fin emerge from the water. Moments later, Myers was bleeding profusely from his feet and ankles.

    “All of the sudden, between the two swimmers we saw a fin come up and something came through the water,” Anne-Marie Corner, who witnessed the attack, told NBC News affiliate WHDH. “It was a very large fin, easily 15 inches high, and came across and torqued a little towards the second swimmer and within seconds we realized it was a shark and the swimmer had been attacked.”

    “It was, like, two people and this large dark blue-black thing came up and kind of torqued around and you saw this big dorsal fin and it, like, went back down,” another witness, Walter Palmer, told WHDH.

    Myers is treated after a suspected shark attack Monday at Ballston Beach in Truro, Mass., on Cape Cod.

    Gregory Skomal, a shark biologist with the state's Department of Fish and Game, later told a press conference that "the weight of evidence points to a white shark."

    Witnesses say that beachgoers -- including a doctor and a nurse -- jumped into action immediately after the attack. Emergency responders quickly arrived at the scene, bandaged Myers' legs and carried him off the beach on a stretcher.

    Myers is being treated at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he will undergo surgery.

    Ballston Beach was open Tuesday, but officials posted signs around the beach warning beachgoers of the recent shark sighting.

    Truro Town Administrator Rex Peterson told the Boston Globe that even if it was determined to be a shark attack, the beach would remain open because  “sharks swim up and down the coast so closing that one particular beach didn’t’ seem to make a whole lot of sense.”

    There have been concerns about shark attacks all summer. Earlier this month a kayaker had a close call with the shark, WHDH reported, and since June there have been several shark sightings near seals.

     

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  • Boyfriend cleared in car crash that killed Yale graduate Marina Keegan

    Ken Mcgagh / AP

    Tracy Keegan speaks during a service in for her daughter Marina Keegan, who died in a car crash in May.

    By Louis Casiano, msnbc.com

    The boyfriend of a woman who was killed in a car crash just days after her graduation in May from Yale was cleared of all charges Thursday in a Massachusetts courtroom, NBC station WHDH in Boston reported.


    Marina Keegan and her boyfriend Michael Gocksch, both 22, had just graduated a few days earlier from Yale when they were on their way to see Keegan's parents in Cape Cod.

    The car they were traveling in drifted into a guardrail after crossing two lanes, causing it to roll over.

    Keegan died at the scene; Gocksch was taken to a hospital and released.

    'My heart's broken': Yale grad Marina Keegan mourned after car crash

    WHDH reported that Gocksch, who’s from New York, told investigators he had fallen asleep at the wheel.

    "I’m very happy for that young man because he’s a fine, fine person," Gocksch’s attorney, Philip Tracy Jr., told the station.

    Keegan’s death shook the Yale campus where she had served as president of the Yale College Democrats and was part of the Yale Occupy Movement.

    An essay she wrote in a special edition of the Yale Daily News, titled "Opposite of Loneliness," was republished in the newspaper and went viral after her death. It was also distributed at the Class of 2012's commencement exercise.

    Read Marina Keegan's essay "Opposite of Loneliness"

    In it she tells her fellow students to "not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have."

    The Boston Herald reported a magistrate ruled there was no probable cause to charge Gocksch with motor vehicle homicide by reckless operation, which state police had sought.

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    State police said the couple were both wearing seatbelts and the driver wasn't speeding at the time of the accident.

    Keegan's work had previously been published in The New York Times and she was slated to start a new job in June as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker.  

    The Herald reported Keegan's parents have supported Gocksch and stood by his side in court Thursday.

    "He certainly wishes it was him and not her who suffered the fatality," Marina's mother, Tracy Keegan said.

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  • Great white shark sightings prompt swimming ban off Cape Cod

    George Breen / CapeCodSharkHunters.com

    This photo shows what Cape Cod Shark Hunters says is a 16-foot great white shark in the foreground swimming near a group of seals. The shark was spotted last week north of the Chatham, Mass., harbor inlet in close proximity to popular swimming beaches.

    By Sevil Omer, NBC News

    One Cape Cod town is warning swimmers of a menace lurking in the waters this Fourth of July: great white sharks.

    Recent sightings of at least two great whites, including one reportedly measuring up to 16 feet in length, prompted officials in Chatham, Mass., to ban swimming in an an area known for its abundance of seals, according to The Cape Cod Chronicle.

    “Chatham issues advisory after numerous shark sightings, banning swimming within 300 feet of seals along eastern coast,” according to a statement posted by the Cape Cod Chronicle on its Twitter account on Sunday.

    Calls by msnbc.com to the Chatham harbormaster were unanswered on Monday.

    George Breen, a pilot for the Sandwich, Mass.-based conservation group Cape Cod Shark Hunters, said he identified two great white sharks during a routine survey flight on June 28. One shark, he said, was seen about a half mile offshore, while the other was just 50 yards from land.

    The larger one, a 16-footer, was spotted near North Beach Island in Chatham, he said.

    “He was big and close to shore,” Breen told msnbc.com.

    Breen said the two great whites he spotted did not appear to be the same two tagged last year and detected via transmitter signals picked off Chatham last week. At least eight sharks were tagged for research last year, Breen said.

    'We have so many seals'
    Shark sightings, including some in near-shore waters, have spiked in recent years as great whites continue to hunt seals off the Chatham coast, said Joe Fitzback, a veteran sea captain with Chatman Bait & Tackle.

    "The great whites have always been here and we will have more," Fitzback told msnbc.com on Monday. "We have so many seals that it only makes sense that we will have more sightings as the years go by."

    Fitzback said he also spotted a great white shark last week but it was unclear if it was one of the two spotted by Breen. He said his first encounter with a great white came in July 2001, when he was in a boat just a couple of miles east of South Beach.

    "They're out there and they're hungry for seals," Fitzback said.

    He said shark sightings have become big business for the resort town, located on the elbow of Cape Cod. Chatham has six beaches, five located on the Nantucket Sound and one on the ocean side of the Atlantic.

    "It's a novelty of sorts," Fitzback said. "When there are sightings, it gets kind of hectic around here. Everyone wants to come down to see the sharks. But the truth is, you can't see them from the beach, you have to go out into the water."

    Last year, several Chatham beaches shut down due to shark sightings and reports of seal attacks.

    As of Monday, Chatham beaches remained open.

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  • Cape Cod dolphin strandings keep rescuers working overtime

    Staff and volunteers from the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Marine Mammal Rescue and Research team try to rescue  and release stranded dolphins on Cape Cod. Msnbc.com's David Friedman reports.

    By msnbc.com staff

    Marine wildlife experts are at a loss to explain this winter’s unprecedented mass stranding of dolphins on the shores of Massachusetts' Cape Cod.

    Volunteers on Tuesday helped refloat 10 more dolphins that were found in a muddy area commonly known as “the gut,” near the Herring River in the town of Wellfleet. An 11th dolphin died.  On Monday, volunteers had rescued three other dolphins in the same vicinity, cared for them for several hours and successfully released them back into open water in Bourne, 52 miles away, an effort chronicled in the video above.

    Those releases bring to 177 the total number of dolphins that have been stranded since Jan. 12, said Kerry Branon of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which is helping with the rescue effort. More than 100 have died.

    Strandings during this time of year are not unusual on the shores of Cape Cod. But the magnitude of this season’s strandings is unprecedented, wildlife officials say. 

    Misty Niemeyer, of IFAW's Marine Mammal Rescue and Research team, says of this winter's spate of strandings, “our staff’s getting a little tired and little weary, and unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down at any point. We’ve had live animal strandings almost every day for the last week at least, and almost every day, or every other day, for the last month. So there really isn’t any sign of it slowing down yet.”

    Branon, for her part, said that it’s the largest dolphin stranding in the Northeast, going by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records, which date back about 20 years.

    She said her organization could find no explanation for this year’s rise in mass strandings.

    The race is on to save a record number of dolphins stranded on the shore. NBC's Anne Thompson reports.

    “We’re not ruling anything out. What we typically find is the animals that strand here strand for natural reasons,” she told msnbc.com.

    Branon noted that dolphins are social animals, “and they stick together for better or for worse.”

    “So far no patterns have emerged, but the many lab analyses will take months to complete, we may yet find one,” Katie Moore, manager of IFAW’s marine mammal rescue and research team, said in a recent blog post.

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  • Staying put on Cape Cod

    By Ron Allen, NBC News Correspondent

    FALMOUTH, MA. – The bridges will soon close and the ferries will stop running. Then Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket will be pretty much on their own with Hurricane Irene when she arrives.

    The folks here are used to this. They know the drill. The vacationers to this sliver of paradise in eastern Massachusetts are leaving in droves. The day trippers have turned back.

    Steven Senne / AP

    Passengers waiting to depart the Island of Martha's Vineyard, right, stand in line to board a ferry in Oak Bluffs, Mass., on Friday. The Steamship Authority, which operates ferries between the island and the mainland, added additional vessels to the schedule in anticipation of the arrival of Hurricane Irene.

    We watched an Island Queen ferry just leave for the Vineyard with only a handful of passengers and crew, probably locals commuting to homes on the island. They, like a lot of the hearty souls who make this place home, are staying put.

    Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said it’s going to be a rough night, with tropical storm force winds hitting around 3 a.m. And then hanging around all day.

    The concern here is that this entire state will get hit. It’s shaped like a rectangle and is perpendicular to the storm’s path. Expect heavy rain in the west, and strong winds in the east.

    It’s been a beautiful day here in Falmouth so far, a great place to sit and watch our colleagues get battered south of here. But Irene's coming. And she won't be a very nice lady tonight.