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Woman Loses Eye In Freak Baseball Accident

HARTLAND (WWJ) - A Hartland woman is recovering after a freak accident at a high school baseball game.

Jenny Kesson was at Linden High School, watching her son play for the Hartland varsity team on March 24, when she bent over to roll up her pants. Her husband Michael said as she stood up, she was hit by a line drive that had gone foul.

"We've been at so many baseball games with my son's travel team. He's been playing for the last eight or ten years, and you know you don't take your eyes off the game and unfortunately, she just stood up at the wrong time and the ball met her at the same time she stood up," he said.

The 41-year-old mother of two was rushed to University of Michigan hospital where doctors told her she would end up losing her eye. Her husband said she's scheduled for a third reconstructive surgery soon.

"We have another surgery on the 10th at U-of-M, a plastic surgery to reconstruct her eye socket and hopefully from there the prosthetic will be put in, and that will be about five or six weeks," he said.

Despite the loss, Michael Kesson said doctors told them his wife was lucky she didn't have any brain damage.

"There was a good chance, if she was just turned a little bit, that it could have been a very different outcome. We're very fortunate that it's only her eye because it could have been a lot worse," he said.

The ordeal has been hard on several people, especially Kesson's 17-year-old son who witnessed the whole thing.

"My son was on third base, so the angle he had from third base to the first base side, he saw the whole thing. He saw the ball hit my wife, he saw her get knocked off her feet," he said.

The Superintendent at the Linden High School has agreed to raise the fence around the baseball diamond to 10 feet.

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