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California firefighters have found the body of a California triathlete on a beach north-west of Santa Cruz, almost a week after she went missing amid speculation that she was killed by a shark.
The remains of Erica Fox 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 from Lovers Point near Monterey, California, on 21 December, but she never returned to shore. A witness driving by the area reported to authorities that they saw a shark with what appeared to be a human body in its mouth emerge from the water, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The disappearance and reports of the shark drew widespread public attention and efforts from authorities to locate Fox. On Sunday, Fox’s husband, Jean-François Vanreusel, and other members of her swim club held a memorial walk along the Lovers Point coastline. 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 numerous triathlons including the annual Escape From Alcatraz challenge.
Authorities last week launched a large-scale search and rescue operation involving multiple US Coast Guard boat crews along with responders from local fire and police departments to look for Fox. The Coast Guard suspended its search last Monday for Fox after a 15-hour operation covering about 84 nautical miles.
California firefighters announced on Saturday that they had recovered a body on Davenport beach, just south of Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz county sheriff’s office issued 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 close proximity to the recent shark attack victim in Monterey County, our agency is working closely with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office and the Pacific Grove Police Department regarding the recovery,” the Santa Cruz county sheriff’s office said.
Editor and fellow swimmer Sara Rubin, writing in 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, multiple 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 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 getting into it—again and again and again, on choppy days and gloriously calm days, logging what I can only guess are thousands of miles.”
Rubin said that Fox “understood the risk” of swimming in an ocean with a population of great white sharks, and would “object to framing this as an attack, and she would urge us to instead call it an incident—an animal’s behavior is just that”.
Although many species of sharks live off the California coast, violent incidents with humans are extremely rare. Prior to Fox’s death, there have been 16 shark-related fatalities in California in the past 75 years.
