More than four years after the family of the deceased launcher of the angels, Tyler Skaggs, has filed an unjustified death for the angels, the selection of the jury will begin on Monday before the Orange county.
The widow of Skaggs, Carli Skaggs and the parents Debra Hetman and Darrell Skaggs, declared in a legal file that they were looking for at least $ 210 million in revenues and damages lost. A lawyer for the angels said in a preliminary hearing that complainants now asked for a 1 billion dollars judgment, although the main lawyer representing the family said the number was an exaggeration.
The trial is expected to last for several weeks. The discovery before the trial included more than 50 depositions and the list of witnesses contains nearly 80 names.
Lawyers of the Skaggs family aim to establish that the angels were responsible for the death of the left -handed launcher on July 1, 2019, after having sniff crushed pills which contained fentanyl in a hotel room during a team road trip in Texas.
An autopsy concluded that Skaggs accidentally died of asphyxiation after succeeding in his own vomit under the influence of fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol.
Angels communications director Eric Kay provided SKAGGS from the oxycodone counterfeit pills that have turned out to be prevented from fentanyl and who serves 22 years in the federal prison for his role in death. Skagg lawyers will try to prove that other employees of other angels knew that Kay provided opioids to Skaggs.
“The angels owed Tyler Skaggs to provide a safe place to work and play baseball,” said the trial. “The angels violated their duty when they allowed Kay, a drug addict, full access to Tyler. The angels also violated their duty when they allowed Kay to provide Tyler with dangerous illegal drugs. The angels should have known that Kay was treating drugs to players. Tyler died following the rupture of the angels. ”
The Skaggs family planned to call many current players and former angels as witnesses, including the future temple of renown Mike Trout and Albert Pujols as well as the launcher Andrew Heaney – Skagg’s best friend in the team – in an attempt to show that Skaggs was a fully functional launcher of the major league and not a drug addict.
The deposits and hearings before trial indicated that the angels were trying to show that Skaggs was a long -standing drug consumer who has acquired pills of sources other than Kay. Skaggs’ mother Debbie Hetman said at the Kay criminal trial in 2022 that her son admitted that he had a “problem” with oxycodone in 2013.
Hetman said her son had left the “cold turkey”, but she testified that dependence remained sufficiently worrying that Skaggs had not prescribed the opioids after having undergone Tommy John surgery in August 2014.
Judge H. Shaina Colover has destroyed a strategy for defense of key angels when she judged that Kay’s criminal conviction could not be challenged during the civil trial. Lawyer Todd Theodora argued that the new evidence indicated that Skaggs died of a “cardiac arrhythmia, second in the fact that Tyler had 10 to 15 glasses in him, coupled with oxycodone, for which the baseball angels are not responsible.”
Theodora said that if the angels could prove that Kay was not guilty out of all reasonable doubts, neither Kay nor the team would be guilty in the death of Skaggs. Colover, however, judged that the “condemnation of Kay, based on the law and the applicable facts, was final”. Kay’s appeal was rejected before the Federal Court in November 2023.
The provisional deposits of the players of the angels and the support staff provided a rare overview of the rowdy culture, often profane of a clubhouse in the major league.
The attendants at the Angels Clubhouse testified that Kay had participated in waterfalls such as the deliberate taking of a quick ball of 85 mi / h of his knee in the hinged cage, by throwing football on his short -term face, eating an insect and eating buttons out of trout.
Tim Mead, the vice-president of long-standing communication from the Angels and the Kay supervisor, has recognized as much in his testimony, saying: “If you try to describe a clubhouse or a locker room in professional sports, or even a college, and probably even the military in terms, and try to equilitate it to the way we see-how this law firm is managed or a company is managed, Know, unfortunately, there is no comparison …
And many pain relievers. Former Angels Matt Harvey, CJ Cron, Mike Morin and Cam Bedrosian players said in Kay’s test that he had distributed blue Oxycodone 30 milligrams to them at Angel Stadium. Skaggs, testimony revealed, was a particularly frequent customer.
The testimony established that Kay was also a longtime user of Oxycodone and that the angels knew. In a file, the SKAGGS family has shown evidence that the doctor of the Angels team, Craig Milhouse, prescribed Kay Hydrocodone 15 times from 2009 to 2012. The Skagg family also plans to call Trout, who, according to the deposit of the former clubhouse Angels, Kris Constantie, proposed to pay the rehabilitation of Kay’s medicines in 2018.
Skaggs was a leading hope coming out of Santa Monica High in 2009, and the Angels made him their choice of draft in the first round. He was exchanged in the Arizona Diamondbacks a year later and made his major leagues debut with them in 2012.
Exchanged to the angels in 2014, Skaggs made the starting rotation, where he remained when he did not fight against his death. His figures were rather ordinary, a record of 28-38 victories-victories with an average of 4.41 made in 96 career departures, but his lawyers underlined his youth and the growing wages granted to the starting launchers to request a jury compensation of at least $ 210 million and up to $ 785 million.
SKAGGS won $ 9.2 million – including $ 3.7 million in 2019 – and would have become a free agent after the 2020 season. Efficient start -up launchers at similar age and comparable performance can order multi -year contracts of $ 100 million or more.
The death of Skaggs prompted MLB to start testing opioids and cocaine in 2020, but only players who do not cooperate with their treatment plans are subject to a discipline. Marijuana has been removed from the list of abuse drugs and is treated in the same way as alcohol.
MLB emergency medical procedures are now requiring naloxone to be stored in clubs, weight rooms, canoes and referee changing rooms in all ballboards. Naloxone, also known with the Narcan brand name, is an antidote for poisoning for opioids.
