Man fatally chokes on bait fish

A Huntington Beach man choked to death Friday after swallowing a bait fish as a joke in front of students on a field trip on a boat off the coast of Long Beach, authorities said.

Craig Harvey, the operations chief of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said that when Jeffrey Twaddle, 54, began to choke, the ship returned to its dock.

Paramedics took Twaddle to St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach at 12:38 p.m. Friday.

They attempted to resuscitate him, but Twaddle went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 1:13 p.m.

Following an examination of Twaddle’s body on Sunday, coroners named the cause of death as “aspiration of fish,” Harvey said.