US

An American football player has died a month after suffering a head-on-head collision during a college game.

Medrick Burnett Jr was playing for Alabama A&M University against Alabama State University on 26 October – the day before his birthday – when the severe injury occurred.

His sister said on his GoFundMe page that the 20-year-old linebacker had “several brain bleeds and swelling of the brain” following the collision in Birmingham, a city in the southeastern US state.

In a “last resort” to save his life, Dominece James said he’d had a craniotomy – the surgical removal of part of the skull to expose the brain.

Alabama A&M athletic department announced his death on Wednesday but later sent a retraction, saying the news had come via “an immediate family member”.

Jefferson County coroner confirmed on Friday that Burnett Jr had died on Wednesday evening.

Read more from Sky News:
Thanksgiving parade disrupted by Gaza protest
Stowaway discovered on flight from New York

The freshman was from Lakewood, California, and joined Alabama A&M in the summer after starting his college career at Louisiana’s Grambling State University.

Articles You May Like

Sweden asks China to help clarify what happened to damaged undersea cables
Hyundai doesn’t care what Trump does, California does it anyway, big Texas solar
Elon Musk asks court to block OpenAI from converting to a for-profit
The young Israelis refusing to fight – and facing jail
Why Elon Musk wants people to have more babies