‘I thought I was going to die’: SLO County surfer says paddleboarder assaulted her
A male paddleboarder who allegedly attacked a female surfer in the ocean off Morro Bay and held her head underwater will face trial, a San Luis Obispo County Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday.
Andrew Eric Gustafson, 60, of Morro Bay was charged with two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon — one with force likely to produce great bodily injury — on Aug. 26 following an altercation three days earlier. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Gustafson was originally booked on Aug. 23 — the day of the incident — on suspicion of attempted murder, but the District Attorney’s Office never filed that charge.
On Wednesday, the woman he allegedly assaulted spoke in court for the first time at his preliminary hearing, offering details about what she says happened in the water that day.
Haylee Red-Van Rooyen said Gustafson paddled into the area where she and her friends were surfing, dropped in on a wave behind her and rammed into her, knocking her off her board.
After they both crashed, she said, he got back onto his paddleboard and chased after her, hit her with his paddle, jumped on her board and forced her head underwater for multiple seconds.
He did so while allegedly shouting and cursing at her.
“I thought I was going to die,” Red-Van Rooyen said on the witness stand Wednesday. “He grabbed my hair and held me underwater, and I didn’t know if I was going to make it.”
Because his client has no prior criminal record and there was no lasting property or medical damage having resulted from the alleged assault, Gustafson’s lawyer Ilan Funke-Bilu argued the charges should be dropped from felonies to misdemeanors.
“I just think that this is the classic story of surfer versus paddleboarder,” Funke-Bilu said, noting that California State Parks rangers first investigated the charges as a misdemeanor before bumping it up to attempted murder.
But Judge Crystal Seiler denied the reduction request and held the charges as felonies due to the “seriousness of the conduct” and the aggravating language Gustafason allegedly used toward Red-Van Rooyen.
“It does appear to me that the offenses in the complaint have been committed, and there is sufficient cause to believe Mr. Gustafson is guilty of them,” Seiler said.
His next court appearance will be on March 2 at 8:30 a.m. in Department 9 of the SLO County courthouse for a pre-trial arraignment.
Surfer recounts altercation. ‘I thought I was going to drown’
An experienced surfer, Red-Van Rooyen said she paddled out at Morro Strand State Beach in front of Beachcomber Street and Hatteras Street on Aug. 23 with a small group of people, like she had done countless times before.
The waves were small that day, with not many people out, and Red-Van Rooyen was borrowing a friend’s longboard that she was taking extra care not to damage, she said.
Before 10:15 a.m. her group had shrunk to herself and two other women, Red-Van Rooyen said. A few other surfers sat to their right and four stand-up paddleboarders were off to their left, she said.
The paddleboarders eventually got out of the water, but one of them — Gustafson — came back out and paddled into the middle of the group Red-Van Rooyen was surfing with and began taking the waves, she said.
“He proceeded to take about three waves and just in the middle of us, so we would have had to pull off the waves,” Red-Van Rooyen said. “And then on the third time, I was way down the line,” — meaning she was far away from Gustafson — “ ... and then he took the wave from behind me and came just tearing down the line, and then ran into the back of me and knocked me off the board.”
Scared and concerned about potential damage to her friend’s board, Red-Van Rooyen had a heated exchanged with Gustafson, she said.
“I was so shocked,” she said. “Even though I saw him way down the line, I knew he was a capable enough surfer to know that there is absolutely no reason to, you know, fly down the line when you see someone in front of you and hit them. You could damage the board, you could hurt the person. It’s a very small day. There was no reason for that.”
She was “very upset” and asked him “what the hell are you doing?” and called him a “d--k” and an “a-----e,” she said. She told she surfed out there all the time and has never had that happen to her before.
“I’m a woman that was raised to stand up for myself, and I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else, so I confronted him,” she said. “Told him that wasn’t that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t right, not necessary.”
Gustafson began yelling expletives back, saying “f--k you” and calling her a “f---ing b---h,” she said.
It was at that moment she noticed his language, body language and behavior escalate, Red-Van Rooyen said.
He paddled right up to Red-Van Rooyen and her friends, bumping her board, she said.
“I saw his face, I saw the aggressive stance, and just the way that he was looking at me and continued to scream at that point, ‘you f---ing b---h,’ over and over,” she said.
Red-Van Rooyen said she tried to move away and put as much distance between herself and Gustafson as possible, but it was too late.
“He raises his paddle, and at that point, I know that he’s going to hit me,” she said.
She turned to the left and put her hands up to protect her face and head as Gustafson raised his paddle overhead and swung down at her, she said.
“I figured that if he hit me directly in the head, it could knock me out,” Red-Van Rooyen said. “I know that how serious that is, you can drown, obviously, if you’ve been knocked unconscious and that, you know, I felt very afraid.”
He swung the paddle to hit the right side of her body, but her wetsuit protected her from sustaining any cuts from the paddle, she said.
She said Gustafson, who was standing on his paddleboard, was “towering over” her as she was leaning back on her surfboard and “trying to get away.”
“The three words that he was saying over and over that day was, ‘you f---ing b---h,’ ‘you f---ing w---e’ and ‘you f---ing c--t,’ over and over,” she said.
He continued to scream as Red-Van Rooyen’s friends also yelled at him to stop while she tried to push away, she said.
Then, standing over her with his paddle overhead again, he jumped on top of her, she said, knocking both of them into the water.
“He grabs my hair, yanks my head back and my neck all the way back, and then throws my head forward, yanks me all the way under the water, and then held me under the water,” Red-Van Rooyen said.
Gustafson probably held her under for about three seconds, she said, but “it felt like forever.”
“Long enough for me to think I wasn’t going to be able to surface,” Red-Van Rooyen said. “... I thought I was going to drown.”
When he finally let go of her hair, she was able to come out of the water and breathe, she said. Right in front of her with his paddle still in hand, she was afraid he was going to hit her again in the face.
“I was terrified of that,” she said. “I was able to get away from him and push back, get back on my board, and turn around, and as fast as I could, I paddled away south,” toward her friends, she said.
Gustafson stayed near “circling the area,” cursing and saying that Red-Van Rooyen came at him first, she said.
“We were three women out there, and he was a man with a paddle,” she said. “We were intimidated.”
Eventually, another group of surfers paddled to her friends to see what happened, she said, so she felt safe to leave them and put distance between herself and Gustafson.
She paddled back to another group of three men who had paddled out in the same areas as Gustafson that day to see if they had seen what had happened.
“They said, ‘Yeah, we know him. He’s a d--k. We just saw him paddle all the way down into the middle of you guys. We were out way over here,’” she said. Then the men told her Gustafson’s name.
Gustafson left Red-Van Rooyen’s friends, and they paddled in, she said. When they got into shore at 10:15 a.m., Red-Van Rooyen reported him to state park rangers.
“I have fear that that could have, or that may have, happened to someone else, and I feel honestly, that if my friends hadn’t been there, I think that could have very well been a different result,” Red-Van Rooyen said. “I don’t know that he would have let me go.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2026 at 4:01 PM with the headline "‘I thought I was going to die’: SLO County surfer says paddleboarder assaulted her."
