Texas A&M-Texarkana baseball player Matthew Delaney remains in ICU after being hit with stray bullet

On Saturday, Texas A&M-Texarkana baseball player Matthew Delaney was hit with a stray bullet while sitting in the left field bullpen. While he was not a target of any kind of attack, the bullet still hit him in the chest, and was immediately sent to the hospital.

An update was provided on Delaney on Tuesday through his mother, Amy Delaney. Her son remains in the hospital in the ICU where she says he is improving on a daily basis. There is still a long recovery ahead but progress is being made.

“He was where he was supposed to be, doing what he was supposed to be doing,” Amy Delaney, said via ESPN. “It’s not something that we would have ever imagined.”

The bullet has not been removed from Delaney’s body, sitting near his spine. Two broken vertebrae were suffered, as was partial paralysis of his left leg and a collapsed lung.

“It’s slowly inflating,” Amy Delany said on the lung. “Each day, that’s gotten a little better. He still does have a chest tube to try to drain some fluid off it.”

Delaney was struck from nearly 400 yards away, with the incident being unrelated to the baseball game occurring at the time. As mentioned, the Texas A&M-Texarkana pitcher was sitting in the bullpen and was not involved.

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

Local Texarkana community helping Delaney family

Support from the local Texarkana community has flooded in according to Amy Delaney. She said people have been offering their homes out so they can be close to their son. Despite not being from around the area, Delaney has appreciated what people have done for her family.

“They have been here every day, calling, coming in, the team, the staff,” she said. “Everyone has reached out. They’ve sent food to us. They have just been so supportive as a community. We’ve had three different small businesses that have made donations to Matthew that are just trying to help any way they can.

“We’ve had people that we don’t even know offered our homes up because we needed a place to stay,” she said via ESPN’s Dave Wilson. “The outpouring from the people here in Texarkana has just been amazing and we’re just so thankful.”