13-Year-Old Attacked By Shark On Family Holiday In Samoa, Parents Watch From Beach

A week ago, 13-year-old Evan Campbell from Australia was attacked by a suspected tiger shark while surfing alone in Samoa. His family — mum, dad, and two brothers — were four days into their two week holiday, watching him from the sand. 

It was evening. The family was staying at a resort a good half-hour from the main waves on the island. After a day of snorkelling and surfing, they returned to find that the king tide had lifted the reef enough to create a little wave right out front. Evan and his older brother paddled out around 6 p.m, while the rest of the family watched him from the beach. 

“All of a sudden, we just heard him screaming,” says Evan’s father, Hamish. “He was out there alone, one of my boys had come in, and Evan was still out there, and we saw him catch a wave on his stomach, and we were like, why isn’t he standing up?”

Confusion first, then panic. The family watched Evan struggle across a deep spot in the channel, paddling desperately, his legs in the air, still screaming.

“We didn’t realise he’d been attacked at that point,” says Hamish. “We thought maybe he’d seen a small reef shark and was a bit freaked out. But he just kept screaming, and he was putting his hand up on his head. Then we realised he’d been attacked.” 

The shark sank into Evan’s right leg, shredding flesh and muscle, its teeth biting through his leash and into his board and leg. The fibreglass, for all its unpalatable utility, might’ve saved his life.

When he realised his son had been hit, Hamish jumped into the water with a couple of the Samoan staff members from the resort, and dragged him onto the sand. Hamish, a paramedic with two decades of experience, had a brought over a first-aid kit from Aus. He wrapped Evan up, threw him into the back of a truck and rushed him to the nearest hospital. There, they hooked him up to an IV and flooded him with antibiotics, ordering the family to get him to Australia, fast.

“Given how deep the wound was, it was beyond what they could handle in Samoa,” Hamish remembers. “They were really worried about infection, sepsis — especially in a tropical environment like that. The next day, they sent an air ambulance from New Zealand to fly him back to Australia. My wife flew with him, and I stayed behind to handle the other two kids and get them back home.”

There’s a pause as Hamish seems to consider how much more to share, before concluding that there might be someone better equipped to pick up the rest of the story. He hands the phone over to Evan, now back in Australia, one surgery down, another on the horizon. The plan is to carve a chunk of skin from his hip, cut it off, flatten it, and graft it onto the gap the shark left behind.

“I’m doing pretty good now,” says Evan. “It was a bit scary at first. The shark just came out of nowhere and got me from behind. I didn’t see it coming. I just saw its tail and body just jumping on the water, and then it took out my leg and my board.”

The whole thing’s caught on video, filmed by Hamish, a recording that could’ve gone horribly wrong. In the footage, you can see the shark turn and come back for Evan. Luckily, just as it’s on him, a wave comes through, a fleeting saviour, and Evan manages to get himself on it.

“It pretty much broke on top of me,” Evan says. “I just had to turn around and just lean into it. The paddle in was terrifying. I tried to lift up my legs, so they wouldn’t be hanging in the water again. It was pretty scary.”

Shark attacks in Samoa are so rare they almost seem a statistical impossibility, given how central the ocean is to life in the Pacific. Since the first recorded attack in 1890, there have been just two fatalities: one in the 70s, involving a swimmer, and another two years ago in 2023, during a botched attempt to tow a dead whale out to sea — an incident directly linked to the activity. There have been a few minor injuries, but that’s it.

Which makes this attack all the more bizarre. The Campbell family, from the Mid North Coast of Australia, are no strangers to the surge of shark activity plaguing the NSW coastline, an anxiety that now nags at anyone who’s heard the stories from fishermen, from family members of victims, or seen the unsettling videos of encounters circulating online. They’d come to Samoa, partly for a family holiday, but also to escape the ever-present fear that’s wormed it’s way into every surf in Australia. 

“My wife and I were actually just watching the boys, and literally five minutes before the incident, we said, ‘how good is this? We don’t even have to worry about sharks like back home,’” says Hamish. “We’d never let them surf at home that late in the day. The beach break just next to our house is pretty sharky all the time, and we’re always on edge. It just felt so safe over there.”

It’s a thought that calls to mind the 2020 incident involving Dylan Naccas, a man from Reunion Island, where a bull shark infestation had led to a surfing ban. Having been legally forbidden from surfing at home, he flew to Australia, paddled out for the first surf of his trip at Bells — one of the statistically safer zones on the Australian coast — and within minutes got nibbled on the foot at South Side. After punching the shark twice, he freed himself, only to have it stalk him the whole way back in, before being air-lifted to hospital. 

A guy from shark-infested Reunion Island, travels halfway around the world to escape the jaws of danger, only to get tagged in one of the safest zones on the Australian coast.

They say you can’t outrun your demons. They also say you take a little bit of home with you, everywhere you go. 

Glad you’re safe, Evan. We heard a certain 3x world champ (and fellow shark-encounter survivor) might be giving you a ring in the next day or two.