DALLAS (AP) – Ty Jordan, a freshman running back to the University of Utah, died in a hospital in the Dallas area after accidentally shooting himself, authorities said Sunday.
University officials announced Jordan’s death on Saturday, a day after he was named Pac-12’s Newcomer of the Year, but did not disclose details.
According to the medical examiner’s records, Jordan, 19, died in a Denton hospital around 10:45 p.m. on Christmas Day.
Police officers had responded about an hour earlier to reports of a shooting at a house in Denton, a town 40 miles northeast of downtown Dallas. The officers discovered that a man had accidentally shot himself in the hip and began providing first aid, Denton police spokeswoman Allison Beckwith told The Associated Press Saturday. She said the man later died in a hospital and investigators did not know how he came to shoot himself.
Beckwith declined to name the man, but online records from the Tarrant County medical examiner on Sunday revealed it was Jordan.
Jordan’s cause of death is listed in the records as “gunshot to the abdomen”. His manner of death has not yet been released, and officials from the medical examiner’s office could not be immediately reached for comment on Sunday. Denton police did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Jordan emerged as a traffic jam in Mesquite, a Dallas suburb about 50 miles southeast of Denton.
Jeff Neill, the head coach at the high school where Jordan played, told the Dallas Morning News, “His smile was infectious and his mind shone brightly on everyone who knew him.”