UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown originally identified the victim of this morning's shark attack at Surf Beach as a 20-year-old Cal State Santa Barbara student who hailed from Orange County. The victim has since been identified as chemical engineering major Lucas Ransom, 19, of Romoland, which is in Riverside County near Menifee.
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Lucas Ransom was body boarding about 150 yards offshore at Surf Beach, which is north of Santa Barbara, about 8:50
a.m. when he was pulled under water.
A friend who saw what was happening went to save Ransom, who suffered a massive leg injury.
He was pulled to the beach, where he bled to death. Personnel from the Vandenberg Air Force Base fire
department pronounced him dead at the scene.
His board was recovered with a section bitten off. Authorities are trying to find missing parts of the young man's leg.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, witnesses estimated the shark was 14 to 18 feet long. Authorities are unsure what kind of shark it was. Surf, Wall and Minuteman beaches were closed for 72 hours as a precaution.
Surf Beach is reportedly popular among surfers and sharks, who have pretty much learned to coexist without incident.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.