Texans’ Tank Dell says shooting injury resulted from a ‘wrong place, wrong time’ situation

Earlier this offseason, Houston Texans wide receiver Tank Dell sustained a minor injury to his leg during a shooting incident in Sanford, Florida. Dell was an innocent bystander in the incident, which saw a 16-year-old arrested after shooting 10 people. 

Texans owner Cal McNair said shortly after the shooting that Dell would make a full recovery, and within a few weeks, Dell was already back to working out and running routes, looking a lot like the player he did during his breakout rookie season. Now, Dell has spoken about the incident itself. 

“First off, I’m blessed,” Dell said during an appearance on teammate C.J. Stroud’s ‘Million Dollaz Worth of Game‘ podcast. “To me, it was just wrong place, wrong time. I went back to see my mom. I wasn’t even planning to go back and go to the little pool party or whatever, but my boys found out I was home, so they hit me up. 

“They was like, ‘Pull up to the party.’ They told me there was going to be security, people getting checked at the door, stuff like that, so I’m like, all right, cool. It’s a good vibe, and there were a lot of people that I knew in there, so it was cool. Then that (expletive) just popped off out of nowhere. It just went south out of nowhere.”

At the time of the shooting, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office said that the incident began as a verbal altercation and escalated from there, and that the shooter was apprehended by a security officer working at the venue, while the victims, including Dell, suffered non-life-threatening injuries. The bullet that hit Dell went cleanly through his leg and out the other side.

“I thought I removed myself from the situation, like when you see on the video when I ran across,” Dell said. “But I put myself in the middle of two people. It just went crazy.”

Stroud, meanwhile, said that the incident made him think about the things he does when he goes back home during the offseason.

“It was a good moment for me to realize, like, I can’t go home and do the same things I was doing, too,” Stroud said. “‘Cause sometimes when I go home, that’s where I’m comfortable at — going to the pool parties, going to the bowling alleys or, like, the skating rinks or to the house parties. This is the people I grew up with. I ain’t changed. Just because I got a little bit of money. For that moment to happen that quick, it was an eye-opening experience.”