Deliberations in the Tyler Skaggs wrongful-death trial against the Angels got underway on Tuesday morning, Dec. 16, with jurors now deciding whether the organization bears any responsibility for the death of the 27-year-old pitcher six years ago in a Texas hotel room on a team road trip.
Through testimony from more than 40 witnesses over two months, the jury heard often-unflattering portraits of Skaggs and Eric Kay, the Angels communications staffer who provided the pitcher with a counterfeit pill — which turned out to contain fentanyl — that Skaggs crushed, snorted and apparently combined with oxycodone and alcohol prior to his death.
Kay is serving time in federal prison for his role in Skaggs’ death. Now, the civil jury will decide whether the Angels should face a hefty monetary penalty as well.
That decision will likely rest on whether the jurors believe the team knew, or should have known, that Kay was providing illicit opioid pills to Skaggs and other players.
An Angels attorney, during closing arguments late Monday, Dec. 15, described Skaggs as a drug addict who took advantage of Kay’s own addiction to get the staffer to take the risk in procuring drugs. Skaggs hid his drug addiction from the team, his own family and his agent, the attorney for the Angels argued, and was responsible for his own death.
But attorneys for the Skaggs family countered during their closing arguments that the Angels ignored repeated signs of Kay’s drug addiction and explicit warnings that Kay was providing the opioids to Skaggs and six other Angels players. Part of Kay’s job was keeping players happy so they would take part in media interviews and promotional appearances, an attorney for the family argued, so Kay was essentially working on behalf of the organization in getting them illicit drugs in order to play through the pain.
“There is no doubt that if Eric Kay was taken out of that clubhouse, that if Eric Kay was not employed, that Tyler Skaggs would still be alive,” Daniel Dutko, an attorney for the Skaggs family, told jurors early Tuesday during his final rebuttal argument.
Angel Attorneys noted that other players testified that Skaggs had introduced them to opioids and told them that Kay could get the pills. Kay purchased the illicit opioids from dealers he met online, exchanging messages with some of them on his work email account. Attorneys for the Skaggs family argued that Skaggs and the other players were using the pills every few days in order to deal with the rigors of a baseball season.
“They want you to believe Tyler Skaggs was a raging drug addict and a selfish person trying to get his coworkers addicted,” Dutko, a Skaggs family lawyer, said of the Angels.
The plaintiff attorneys ended closings by showing video of Skaggs pitching at Angels Stadium, his teammates memorializing him after his death and Skaggs growing up and spending time with his family and friends. The final images shown to jurors before they began deliberations was a photo of the glove Skaggs used growing up in Santa Monica next to a glove he used as a major league pitcher, and a simple text to Skaggs, sent after his death, in which his wife Carli wrote “I love you so much” along with a heart emoji.
Attorneys presented vastly different estimates as to how much Skaggs could have earned if not for his untimely death. Attorneys for the Skaggs family suggested $101 million, while attorneys for the Angels countered with an estimate of up to $32 million. Attorneys for the family didn’t suggest a monetary figure to potentially compensate for the Skaggs’ families loss of love and companionship, but suggested it should be more than the economic damages from a baseball contract.
The jury verdict could also open the door to punitive damages. So even a finding of partial responsibility by the Angels could potentially result in hefty financial damages by the team.