Lawyers representing lovable cartoon shark Jabberjaw confirmed Wednesday that their client was apprehended by Florida police yesterday and charged with several counts of first degree manslaughter in connection with a recent string of attacks on Florida beach-goers.

All of this left members of the media wondering where it all went wrong from America's favorite man-eater. Even for those few who know of Jabberjaw's dark side, word of the arrest came as a complete shock.

Former Neptunes bandmate Clam Head could not believe the news. "Sure, he had his problems, but he didn't want to hurt anybody. He's a drummer, not a killer."

Ever since his salad days in the mid-seventies, Mr. Jaw has been on a long and constant slide into self-destruction. While working as an extra for the movie Jaws, a friend introduced him to chum. Although he says that he didn't like it at first, the substance soon became his escape from the pain of being an out-of-work actor. Before he knew it, Jabberjaw had a ten bucket a day habit.

This downward trend culminated in a 1981 robbery of a Starkist packing plant. Looking back, Jabberjaw says that the crime spree was just a desperate attempt to garner the respect that he felt he never got during his show's original run.

"I get no respect," he wrote in his 1986 autobiography. "I've undergone years of therapy to come to grips with this. It is still difficult to talk about it."

In 1998, Jabberjaw bit off the arm of a lawyer who contacted him to issue a subpoena. The lawyer, representing the company which owns the rights to Rodney Dangerfield and Curly of The Three Stooges, issued a suit claiming the cartoon fish's laugh, catchphrase, and mannerisms infringed on his employers' copyrights.

"I sure showed him," Jabberjaw recalls. "The long arm of the law ain't so long no more. N'yuck, n'yuck, n'yuck."

Regardless of his checkered past, it looks as though the former Saturday morning staple simply got mixed up with the wrong crowd and a bad set of circumstances.

According to an anonymous source inside the department, Jabberjaw told police that he spent most of the eighties chasing Charley Tuna up and down the East coast. But as commercial fishing depleted the tuna population, Jabberjaw and friends had to hunt further and further inland to survive.

After a season of hunger and privation, food of any kind was certainly a welcome sight. Jabberjaw and his pals hopped from feeding frenzy to feeding frenzy, barely taking time to roll their eyes forward. But the bacchanalian feast had its cost. By the time they hit the beaches, they were so "baked" on chum that they mistook humans for their natural prey.

The attacks were all a horrible mistake, he told police.

"If the food was out there, we'd be there," said the animated shark. "We're only here for food- and residual checks."

Indeed, Jabberjaw's troubles may be at an end for now. In a reaction to the Summer-full of shark attacks, The Cartoon Network has begun airing the cartoons again, and there is already talk of new episodes. The residuals may not be much, but it will be enough to keep Jabberjaw and his friends in Cheetos and Beer until the tuna return.