California firefighters have found the body of a California triathlete on a beach northwest of Santa Cruz, nearly a week after she went missing amid speculation she was killed by a shark.
Erica Fox’s remains were found on Saturday, her father and husband confirmed to local news outlets. Fox, 55, was part of a group of more than a dozen swimmers who left Lovers Point near Monterey, California, on December 21, but never returned to shore. A witness who was driving in the area reported to the authorities that they saw a shark with what appeared to be a human body in its mouth coming out of the water, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The disappearance and reports of the shark attracted widespread public attention and efforts by authorities to locate Fox. On Sunday, Fox’s husband, Jean-François Vanreusel, and other members of her swimming club made a memorial walk along the coast of Lovers Point. Fox’s father, who confirmed the death to NBC Bay Area, described his daughter as an empathetic and kind person who loved to swim, and who had taken part in several triathlons including the annual Escape From Alcatraz challenge.
Authorities last week launched a large-scale search and rescue operation involving several US Coast Guard boat crews along with a response from local fire and police departments to search for Fox. The Coast Guard suspended its search last Monday for Fox after a 15-hour operation covering approximately 84 nautical miles.
California firefighters announced Saturday that they recovered a body on Davenport Beach, just south of Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz County sheriff’s office released a statement the same day, citing an ongoing investigation into the death.
“Today, at approximately 2:00 pm, a body was recovered from the ocean south of Davenport Beach. Due to the proximity of the recent victim of a shark attack in Monterey County, our agency is working closely with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office and the Pacific Grove Police Department on the recovery,” said the Santa county office Cruz.
Editor and fellow swimmer Sara Rubin, writing in the Monterey County Weekly, described Fox as a friend and passionate athlete who found peace in the Pacific Ocean.
“Twenty years ago, Erica Fox and a friend started swimming every Sunday at Lovers Point in Pacific Grove. Since then, several books have been written about the science of swimming and what it does for our brains. But Erica never needed a book to tell her what she knew through experience: Swimming in the ocean is a balm for the body and mind, an adventure as much as a meditation.” Rubin wrote. “She developed a deeply intimate relationship with the Pacific Ocean not by studying it or by looking at it, but by walking into it—again and again, on blustery days and gloriously calm days, logging what I can only imagine are thousands of miles.”
Rubin said that Fox “understood the risk” of swimming in an ocean with a population of great white sharks, and she was “objective to framing this as an attack, and she encourages us to call it an accident instead—an animal’s behavior is just that.”
Although many shark species live off the coast of California, violent incidents with humans are extremely rare. Before Fox’s death, there had been 16 shark-related fatalities in California in the past 75 years.