HOUSTON – Texans wide receiver Tank Dell and quarterback CJ Stroud sat down with Million Dollaz Worth of Game in a video released on Sunday.
In the interview, Dell opened up and talked about the shooting for the first time and Stroud’s first reaction when he heard about his teammate being injured.
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“First off, I’m blessed... to me it was just wrong place, wrong time,” Dell said.
He recalled going back to his home city to visit his mother, but was invited by a friend to a pool party.
“I wasn’t even planning to go to the little pool party, or whatever, but my boys saw that I was home and told me to pull up. They told me it was security, people getting checked at the door, good vibes and it was a lot of people I knew,” Dell said.
He said he thought he would be safe but that things “went south out of nowhere.”
During the fight, Dell said he thought he removed himself from the situation, but ended up between the two people fighting.
“You see in the video when I ran across, I thought I removed myself from the situation -- from the altercation -- when they were fighting but I put myself in the middle of two people and it just went crazy,” he said.
Stroud was asked about his response when he first heard the news of Dell being shot.
“You know, it’s kind of crazy, I was actually in Philly. I was with my man Michael Rubin and Michael Parsons, so I was there at the 76ers vs the Knicks,” he said.
Stroud said after the game, he receives a long text message from Texans PR about Dell being shot.
“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.
Stroud said the first thing he did was go into prayer and thankful that God saved him from a tragic situation.
“Even though we know that we are normal, we regular still, maybe like, the people around us, they still don’t know that, so they still bring us around that environment,” 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. 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.”
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW BELOW: