College baseball player hit by stray bullet remains in ICU but improving - ESPN

Matthew Delaney, the Texas A&M-Texarkana baseball player struck by a stray bullet on the field this weekend, is in intensive care with partial paralysis of his left leg among other serious injuries, his mother said on Tuesday.

Amy Delaney of Princeton, Texas, said her son Matthew, 18, a freshman baseball player for the Eagles, still has a long road to recovery but is improving each day. She's still stunned by the random nature of the shooting, with Matthew standing by the bullpen during a game against the University of Houston-Victoria when he was shot in the chest.

«He was where he was supposed to be, doing what he was supposed to be doing,» Amy Delaney said. «It's not something that we would have ever imagined.»

She said doctors are still unable to remove the bullet, which remains lodged near Matthew's spine and he suffered two broken vertebrae. She said while he still cannot move his left leg, he has started to regain some sensation and can tell when someone is touching it, in addition to starting to be able to wiggle a toe on occasion.

The gunshot wound also caused a collapsed lung, which Amy said is starting to improve.

«It's slowly inflating,» she said. «Each day, that's gotten a little better. He still does have a chest tube to try to drain some fluid off it.»

Texarkana police say the bullet was fired during a shootout in a nearby neighborhood.

«The incident started as a disturbance there that led to two men shooting at each other in front of the house,» Texarkana PD wrote in a Facebook post. «One of those errant rounds travelled about 400 yards and struck the innocent victim at the ball field.»

The police department said today that the last remaining suspect turned himself in overnight and was booked into jail.

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