Von Miller Won’t Be Charged Hammerhead Shark Incident, Boat Owner Fined

Von Miller in a file photo. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

Former Super Bowl MVP Von Miller will not face charges for posting a photo of a hammerhead shark on social media.

The operator of the boat received a $2,000 fine, reported the Denver Post, citing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Miller, who played his entire career with the Denver Broncos, posted a photo of the shark in March 2018.

Miller was on a deep-sea fishing trip off the coast of Miami and helped reel in a hammerhead shark before he posted a photo of the tail on social media accounts. He was criticized at the time.

According to TMZ, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) blasted Miller and the crew for the fishing trip.

Miller said the shark was tossed back into the water alive.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said that harvesting hammerheads is prohibited in Florida waters. If a shark is accidentally caught, there are regulations to release it back into the wild to ensure its survival, and federal officials said the operator didn’t follow those regulations, according to the Post.

“We followed the rules and I did everything I was supposed to do,” Miller said at the time, it was reported.

The shark was about 9 1/2 feet in length.

Other details about the incident are not clear.

Shark Bites Bait Bag

A commercial fisherman and his girlfriend saw a large great white shark lunging from the water to get a bait bag near the Florida Keys.

The shark was estimated to be about 15 feet in length, according to the Miami Herald.

“Oh my God,” Suzy Grumbo, the girlfriend of Carter Bates, can be heard in the video.

The big shark emerged near Summerland Key on April 23 to get a taste of what was inside Bates’s chum bag while Grumbo filmed it.

As of April 26, it had about 200,000 views on Facebook.

“I’ve certainly never seen anything like this before,” she told the Miami Herald. “Yeah, it was definitely the most humbling experience I think I’ve ever come across,” she added to NBC Miami. “It’s like going from this small town girl to the girl with the great white shark, you know?”

Bates said he worked as a commercial fisherman for about 10 years, and he added to the paper that he was fishing for yellowtail snapper.

The great white, he said, was circling their vessel for about three hours before it bit the chum bag.

Bates noted that the large fish didn’t want the snapper that they had caught.

“It only wanted the chum block,” the Herald quoted him as saying.

“When it’s there, right there, it’s like yeah, a little intimidating, but at the same time amazing because that’s a creature I’ll probably never ever see again,” Bates also told NBC Miami of the animal.

It can be a bit of a shock when a giant great white shark pops its head out of the water. (Bernard Dupont/Flicker—CC BY-SA 2.0))