Sand tiger shark aka Grey nurse shark - Credit: Richard Ling

Left on the beach for dead. This is the extremely sad thing which happened to an 8 foot sand tiger shark at Carolina Beach the night before yesterday. WWAY found the shark dead and decaying in a maintenance yard today.

A 15 year old resident and his cohorts are claiming that the police told them to take the shark out of the water and leave it on the beach to die. The youngsters admonish that they wanted to save the poor thing, by pushing it back out into the water, but they did as they were told.

The sand tiger shark is a protected species, and as such it should not have been left to die out there on the beach. The shark was discovered at 11:30 PM Tuesday on Carolina Beach in front of the boardwalk. The local authorities called in a tow truck to remove the beast before any tourists arrived in the morning. Spectators could only watch in awe, as the shark swung from the back of the truck, taking its last breaths.

The shark was just unceremoniously dumped off in a maintenance yard, where later, someone decided to take its teeth as a souvenir. Evan Pye says that the local constabularies just sat back in their cruisers and watched the horrid scene unfold last night.

“They were just like, ‘Sons bring it up here.’ We’re like ‘Why? Why bring it up here?’ because we were trying to make it live. ‘No, you got to bring it up here. You got to bring it up here.’ We’re like ‘We’re not going to bring it up there,’ and they’re like, ‘Bring it up right now,’ and started yelling at us and stuff like that and telling us that they’re going to arrest us and stuff like that,” Pye explained.

The chief of police has made an apology, but it is not yet clear if the officers in question will be reprimanded for this horrid decision they made.