Brian Waddill is seen beating a shark to death with a hammer and tossing it back into the ocean. (Harbour House Oceanfront surfcam screenshots)
A 33-year-old man in Florida caught on video beating a shark to death with a hammer while fishing at the beach last year will not do any time behind bars for the brutal act of violence.
Eighteenth Judicial Circuit Court Judge Kimberly L. Musselman ordered Brian Waddill to be placed on probation for 12 months when he’ll also be prohibited from any form of fishing, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
In addition, Musselman ordered Waddill to make a $250 donation to the Brevard County Zoo, pay $336 in court fees and costs, and take the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC) shore-based shark fishing course within 11 months.
According to court documents, officers with the FWC responded to a call at 3:02 p.m. on Dec. 20, 2022, regarding an adult male with a hammer beating a shark at Bicentennial Beach in Indian Harbor Beach.
At the scene, the witness who placed the call told the officer he had just seen a white male with blonde hair and a purple shirt “repeatedly striking a shark after reeling it in.” The witness said he did not stick around to see what became of the shark but told the officer that he recorded the incident and showed him the footage captured on his cellphone.
The officer found Waddill about 15 minutes later and stopped him to talk.
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“As soon as I spoke with Mr. Waddill, I was able to determine that he caught a shark, which he identified as a Black Tip, and subsequently ‘harvested’ the shark,” the officer wrote in the affidavit. During our interaction, I explained to Mr. Waddill that if he harvested the shark, then he would have kept it. Mr. Waddill disagreed with the state’s definition of ‘harvest.””
The officer then recounted the video to Waddill, saying that he saw Waddill catch a shark, reel it in, and administer “blunt force to the shark’s head” before returning it to the water. An FWC report states that at one point, Waddill flips the shark on its side and “used the claw portion of the hammer to rip out the shark’s gills.”
When asked if he had a fishing license, Waddill allegedly claimed he did not need one because he was eligible for food stamps. When asked to produce his SNAP (food stamp) benefit card, he could not, the affidavit states.
An expert later identified the species as a lemon shark.
He was initially charged with one count of possession of a prohibited species and failure to release a shark without unnecessary harm.
Video of the beating captured by a beachfront restaurant quickly went viral. It shows Waddill fishing on the beach’s shoreline when he catches a lemon shark. As the shark gets closer to the beach, Waddill can be seen using a hammer to repeatedly smash the shark in the head and drag it around the beach — at one point digging the claw hammer into the shark’s gills and dragging it. He then brings the shark’s corpse back to the water and tossed its lifeless body in.
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