Houston Texans wide receiver Tank Dell discussed publicly for the first time the night he was shot in April and said it was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Dell made his comments on the “Million Dollaz Worth of Game” podcast, where he appeared with teammate C.J. Stroud, in an episode that was posted this week.
Dell was injured at a private event in Sanford, Florida, on April 28 where 10 people were wounded after shots were fired. Dell suffered a minor wound and has since returned to practice at the Texans’ OTAs.
“First off, I’m blessed, you know. To me, it was just wrong place, wrong time,” Dell, who is from Daytona Beach, Florida, said on the podcast. “I went back to see my mom, I wasn’t even planning to go to the little pool party or whatever, but my boys saw that I was home, so they hit me up and 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 was a lot of people that I know in there, so it was cool.
“And then that s— just popped off out of nowhere. It just went south out of nowhere.”
Police have released video that shows Dell caught in the middle of the altercation as shots were fired. A 16-year-old suspect was charged with attempted homicide, firing a weapon in a public place, using a firearm during a felony and illegal possession of a firearm by a minor.
“… I thought I removed myself from the situation. When you see on the video, when I ran across I thought I removed myself from the little situation of the altercation when they was fighting, but I put myself in the middle of two people, and it just went crazy.”
Stroud said he was attending a playoff game between the New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers when he received word from the Texans that Dell had been shot and called the situation an “eye-opener.”
“All I read was ‘Tank got shot’ and I just dropped my phone, I start tearing up man. You know, when you hear that, you start thinking the worse,” he said on the podcast.
He said it “was a good moment for me to realize that I can’t go home and do the same things that I was doing, too.”
“Cause sometime I go home, that’s where I’m comfortable at, going to the pool parties, going to the bowling alleys, like the skating rinks to the house parties, like, these the people I grew up with, I ain’t change cause I got a little bit of money,” he said. “But for that moment to happen that quick, it was like an eye-opener experience, not only for Tank but really for rest of the world and athletes all around.”
Dell’s rookie season ended in early December when he suffered a broken leg in a game against the Denver Broncos. He had 709 receiving yards at the time of his injury and was on pace for 1,205 yards.
