Video from the scene showed at least six people rushing to get the victim out of the surf and onto the beach.
“I just presumed he might have got knocked out, because he wasn’t moving in the water,” he said.
Parker told 7 News that he saw that the man was badly injured, but surf lifesavers began treating him as soon as rescuers got him to the beach. Parker said the wound extended from the man’s groin to slightly past his knee.
“He was pretty much already gone by then,” Parker said.
Paramedics treated the man, who has not been identified, but he died at the scene, police said.
Beach protected by shark nets
“Everyone was running around, there were kids crying on the sand … A few people were standing by and were watching and couldn’t believe what they were seeing,” he said. “It was so sad, it was really sad.”
Cabral told 9 News that he was filming his 13-year-old son in the water when he heard people yelling “shark, shark, shark.”
“The first thing that came to my mind was that I just wanted my son and his friends to be out of the water … I couldn’t feel my body at all, I was completely frozen, I was blank, he told 9 News. “I started screaming to my son to get out of the water.”
A police helicopter to launched to search for the shark while beaches north and south of Greenmount were closed after the attack and nearby beaches will be closed on Wednesday, 9 News reported.
Greenmount Beach is protected by shark nets, which are designed to catch potentially dangerous sharks, so they can’t harm people.
Gavin Naylor, the program director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told CNN that the number of fatal shark attacks can jump dramatically from year to year.
“We see fluctuations every year and we don’t make too much of them,” he said.
In April, a Queensland wildlife ranger was killed by a great white, and in January a 57-year-old diver died from a shark attack in Western Australia state.