A Utah father of four died after being struck by lightning while riding a jet ski in Florida on Saturday evening. Steve Matheson, 47, was hit by a lightning bolt off the coast in Fort De Soto Park in Petersburg around 6:30 p.m., according to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. He was transported to a local hospital, where he later died from his injuries.
Matheson's family has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help cover the costs of bringing his body back to Utah and to support his wife and four children. The fundraiser's organizer described Matheson as a devoted husband and loving father whose family was his greatest joy. As of Sunday, the campaign had raised over $38,000 of its $100,000 goal.
This is the third fatal lightning strike in Florida within a week. On August 23, Kenya Glasgow, 31, and her two-year-old daughter were killed after being struck by lightning in Margate. Later that same day, another child was taken to a trauma center after a lightning strike near Boynton Beach.
Matheson's death is the 13th lightning-related fatality in the U.S. this year. In May, 18-year-old Michael Aiden Vargas died while kayaking in the Blackwater River in Santa Rosa County, Florida, after being struck by lightning. It took dive teams more than ten hours to recover his body.
Florida is known as the "lightning capital" of the U.S., recording over 2,000 lightning-related injuries in the past 50 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While approximately 37 million lightning bolts strike the ground annually in the U.S., the odds of being struck are less than one in a million, and only about 10 percent of such incidents are fatal. Research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that boating, fishing, and camping are the activities most frequently associated with lightning-related deaths. Activities like jet-skiing on water increase exposure risk, as lightning is more likely to strike taller objects.