College Baseball Player Angel Mercado-Ocasio Dead at 19 After Field Accident

A Pennsylvania community is mourning the loss of a college baseball player.

Angel Mercado-Ocasio died May 23 at age 19, succumbing to a traumatic head injury he sustained a day earlier. A makeshift wooden dugout he helped build at a ball field used by his recreation baseball league in his native Harrisburg, Penn. collapsed on top of him, Fox 43 reported.

At the time of the accident, Angel, his coach and a few other teammates were taking down the structure, which they put up themselves before a game, the outlet said, adding that the city had recently told them they didn't have a permit to build on the property.

"Angel had the biggest heart," Alejandro Escudero, one of the late player's close friends, told Fox 43. "He was an innocent kid, I just wonder why it had to be him."

Mercado-Ocasio was a second baseman for his recreation team, and also played baseball at Central Penn College.

"Our Central Penn College family is devastated by the loss of Angel," the school's president, Linda Fedrizzi-Williams, wrote in an email shared on the college's website. "As friends who have become family, we are mourning the heart-wrenching loss of one of our own, a promising young athlete who senselessly lost his life while helping others enjoy the sport he loved so much."

She continued, "No words can adequately express our anguish. Our baseball team all said their good-byes to Angel yesterday and expressed their love to their brother. We will all be changed because Angel is no longer with us, but we will also be changed because he was."

The school's president concluded her note with a message of condolences for those closest to him. "It is with heavy hearts that we offer our sincere sympathy to Angel's family, friends, teammates and coaches, who will bear the burden of his absence most acutely," she said. "We as a community will come together to remember him, support each other and heal, and to live a life of purpose, because it can disappear in a second."