A stray foul ball is usually the most dangerous thing a fan has to deal with at the baseball but on Tuesday a fan at a St Louis Cardinals game felt a pain in her elbow – it later emerged a bullet had grazed her arm.
The victim was sitting behind the home team dugout at Busch Park when the incident happened, and other spectators soon realized something was seriously wrong. Todd Porter, who was sat nearby, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch that the woman said she thought she had been shot. “We thought she was joking, but everybody turned around and she showed me the blood coming down from her elbow,” Porter said. “It looked real purple and red and it looked like there was a hole in her jacket.”
The woman found a bullet slug under her seat, and security was called. Police later confirmed they found the slug and had earlier received reports of shots being fired around a mile from the ground. They believed someone may have been firing into the air.
The Cardinals released a statement confirming they were aware of the incident. “There is nothing more important than the safety of our fans, and the Cardinals are grateful that no one was seriously injured,” read the statement.
Porter told the Post-Dispatch he was angry the club did not tell fans earlier. “This is terrible,” he said. “Someone is shot in the elbow and no one hears about it? Let the public know what’s going on. If somebody out there is shooting, I understand you didn’t want people to get up during the game and run, but at least let people know this happened as soon as possible and know, ‘We’re sorry to hear it happened to her and checking to find out what happened.’”
Incredibly, this is not the first time a Cardinals fan has been shot at a game. In 1965, a gunman held up the ticket office at Sportsman’s Park, which was then the home of the Cardinals, and a stray bullet grazed a teenage fan’s throat. She made a full recovery.
