Aunt of Cape Cod shark attack victim says nephew laughed off her warnings: 'The sharks don't bite me, I'm Superman!'

The aunt of the Massachusetts man killed in a shark attack last weekend in Cape Cod says she tried to warn him of the dangers of the water – only to have her concerns brushed aside with a joke.

Marisa Medici, whose nephew Arthur Medici had his femoral artery severed by the shark’s bite Saturday, said she regularly urged him not to go in the water.

“That’s where he wanted to be every day. Every day. Always I asked him ‘Don’t go. Please don’t go.’ He’d say, ‘Aunt, they’re not going to bite me. The sharks don’t bite me. I’m Superman!’ He was always making jokes about himself,” she told the Boston Herald.

“And when it happened, I couldn’t believe it was him, that it happened to us. There’s no words… I didn’t know that he would die doing something that he loved. But he did.”

The 26-year-old community college student was boogie boarding near the Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, Mass. when the shark pounced.

Despite multiple attempts to save him, he died at a local hospital, marking the first shark-related death in Massachusetts in eight decades.

“He was very handsome outside, inside, joyful. The house was always full of his laughter,” Marisa Medici said. “He never complained. Never complained. He was amazing.”

Arthur was a native of Brazil and had been living in the United States for four years.

Medici said her nephew was preparing to pop the question to his girlfriend of two years, a local medical student – and that he’d visited the beach that fateful day with his future brother-in-law.

“Because the shark bit on the back of his legs, the calves, he lost a lot of blood. Basically everything,” Marisa said. “When he was on the sand, he’d already lost the blood. They did CPR, they did everything. They didn’t save him.”