A shark recently killed a Minnesota woman by biting her arm off as she swam off the coast of the US Virgin Islands while on vacation, according to authorities and media reports.
Arlene Lillis, 56, was in waters off St Croix’s Dorsch Beach when the rare deadly shark attack occurred at about 4.30pm on 8 January, the Virgin Islands police department said in a statement. Emergency crews who responded to multiple calls about Lillis’s plight soon confirmed she had “lost an arm”, and she ultimately died from her injuries, the police statement added.
A US Virgin Islands news outlet named the St Thomas Source spoke with a nurse and former lifeguard who reportedly tried to help Lillis after he heard what he described as “ungodly screaming” from her.
Christopher Carroll of Utah recounted swimming out toward Lillis and realizing that she was still conscious despite her left arm having been bitten off below the elbow. Carroll said he heard Lillis say: “I’m going to die.”
“I just kept trying to reassure her,” Carroll told the Source. “I just kept saying, ‘No … you’re going to be OK.’ I figured if we got her to a hospital, she’d have a fighting chance.”
Carroll was in St Croix with his wife celebrating their anniversary. He reportedly got help pulling Lillis to the shore from Ryan Connot, a power company lineman visiting from Nebraska who was snorkeling nearby with his family and had been trained to administer CPR.
“She told us her name was Arlene,” Connot later said to the Source. “I think that was the last thing she said.”
Both bystanders and medical professionals tried to render aid to Lillis once she had been brought back to the beach. But Carroll said to the Source that she had lost significant amounts of blood by the time she was put on an ambulance to take her to the hospital.
Neither Carroll nor Connot said they saw the shark that mauled Lillis. But officials suspected she indeed had been attacked by a shark, according to statements from the US Virgin Islands governor, Albert Bryan Jr, and his lieutenant, Tregenza A Roach, that were cited by the Source.
“We are grateful to the bystanders who acted immediately to render aid and to the first responders who worked urgently and bravely in an effort to save [Lillis’s] life,” Bryan said.
Connot told the Source that he leapt into action because “I would hope someone would do the same for me”. Carroll added to the outlet: “If anything comes out of this, I just want people to care enough about each other to help – in any way you can.”
Shark attacks in general are unusual, and deadly ones even more so. According to unofficial figures maintained by the online monitoring resource trackingsharks.com, there were fewer than 70 shark bite attacks reported globally in 2025, 11 of which were fatal.
Of those, 28 were in the US, with more than half occurring in Florida. Only one of those 28 US shark bite attacks was deadly, the resource said.
The International Shark Attack File, housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History, usually provides definitive annual totals for the prior year each February.
Neighbors of Lillis in Minnesota told Valley News Live that she lived in the community of Detroit Lakes with her husband, Richard. They said they understood that Lillis died while snorkeling after having just arrived in St Croix with Richard to stay at the couple’s property there until May to take a break from Minnesota’s typically harsh winter conditions.
The US Virgin Islands congressional representative, Stacey Plaskett, was among those to express condolences for Lillis’s family.
“The loss of a loved one under such devastating circumstances is beyond words,” Plaskett said in a statement. “And our entire community shares in their grief.”
