Yesterday morning Brazilian surfer Ricardo Dos Santos was shot three times following an altercation near Embaú Guard beach in Brazil. Initial information regarding both Dos Santos’s wellbeing and the initial incident was hazy and often contradictory, but Dos Santos’s official Facebook page recently posted the following message:

“Brazilian surfer Ricardo dos Santos remains in serious conditions after being shot following an altercation in his hometown of Guarda do Embaú, Santa Catarina State.

Since then, STAB magazine has spoken to Hardcore‘s Steve Allain, according to whom Dos Santos is now expected to remain in the induced coma for the next 36 hours.

“The doctors are waiting to see how his body copes with all the new blood,” Steve told STAB. “They used – I kid you not – 40L of blood in transfusions to save his life. There were record donations yesterday after Adriano (De Souza) and co. posted on Instagram. There was even a line for donating blood! The main problems now aren’t the perforated lung and kidney, but the severed arteries. That’s what made him bleed so much. Doctors say that people who sever this specific vein (‘veia mana’, in Portuguese), have a two percent survival rate.”

Adriano de Souza, who reportedly visited Ricardo in hospital, helped orchestrate a social media campaign to source the required volume of blood by posting the photo below to his instagram. Many other surfers and fans followed suit.

The only two suspects in the case, Luis Paulo Mota Brentano, 25, and his brother, 17, have both been detained by police after they handed themselves in. The older of the two brothers, believed to be the shooter, has been identified by different media outlets as both a policeman and a soldier; Steve Allain said the man wan an off-duty military police officer, who has previous charges of assault and abuse of power.

Various conflicting reports of the shooting itself have so far emerged. All involve the two suspects taking drugs in their near car Embaú Guard beach, and Dos Santos approaching the two men and asking them to move. Some versions affirm that Dos Santos asked the two men to move because they were behaving antisocially, taking drugs and playing loud music where people access the beach. Surfer magazine reports that there were also children in the vicinity. According to other versions, Ricardo was doing some work on his Grandad’s house, and the men parked on a pipe that was part of the work.

Dos Santos was shot three times in total, suffering a punctured kidney and one punctured lung. Ricardo’s uncle says the first shot hit him in the back, whereupon he turned around, and was shot twice more in the front. The thoughts of the entire surfing community are with him and his family.