UVA RB Mike Hollins out of ICU, awake and alert after second surgery following shooting

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WDBJ) - Virginia running back Mike Hollins is out of his second surgery, is doing well and is off a ventilator, the law office of Gordon McKernan told WDBJ7, saying the office was cleared from the family to report on Hollins’s status.

McKernan is a lawyer in Hollins’s native town of Baton Rouge. He is not representing the running back, but Mike Hollins’ mother is an employee and “long time family friend of the McKernan’s.”

Hollins is awake and alert, and is communicating. He was previously in the ICU but is now doing better.

University of Virginia Head Football Coach Tony Elliott was asked Tuesday afternoon about the status of his junior running back, one of five people shot during the UVA tragedy Sunday night.

Elliott said he is unaware of the current status of his injuries, but that he has visited with Hollins and his family in the hospital.

According to Sports Illustrated as of late Monday night, he was is in critical condition, on a ventilator and scheduled to undergo a second surgical procedure Tuesday for a gunshot wound.

An excerpt from the Sports Illustrated article can be found below:

““It’s been a long 24 hours,” says Gordon McKernan, a lawyer in Hollins’s native town of Baton Rouge. “Mike is a fighter.”

McKernan, a close friend of the Hollins family, spoke to Mike Hollins’s mother, Brenda, earlier Monday. Brenda has worked for McKernan’s law firm for the past seven years, and his son John played AAU basketball and high school football with Hollins. McKernan agreed to speak on the family’s behalf.

“It’s been hard,” McKernan says. “He is what you want your son to be. He’s that guy. He’s been at our house so much. We’ve gone on trips with them. He is polite, respectful, smart. He’s driven, tenacious and persistent.””