FORT WORTH, Texas — Four major league players have testified that they received oxycodone pills from a former Los Angeles Angels employee who is accused of providing pitcher Tyler Skaggs with the drugs that led to the pitcher’s overdose death.
Last week, the trial began for the former Los Angeles Angels employee accused of supplying the drugs that killed Skaggs in July 2019.
Pitchers Matt Harvey, Mike Morin and Cam Bedrosian and first baseman C.J. Cron were all on the stand Tuesday. They all played for the Angels.
Former team employee Eric Kay faces federal drug distribution and conspiracy charges. The 27-year-old Skaggs was found dead in a suburban Dallas hotel room. He had choked to death on his vomit, and a toxic mix of alcohol, fentanyl and oxycodone was found in his system.
Federal prosecutors allege that Kay, who was the Angels’ director of communications and served as the team’s public relations contact, obtained oxycodone pills from various sources and distributed them to Skaggs and others.
Skaggs, 27, died before the start of a series between the Angels and Texas Rangers.
Last Thursday, a majority of testimony came from an analyst who talked at length about the apps Skaggs was using and who the pitcher was talking to on the day of his death.
The witness, a Secret Service “network intrusion analyst," testified for the majority of the day, going into extreme detail how one pulls “data of data” off a cellphone.
Prosecution and defense both asked him questions about who Tyler Skaggs was texting in the hours before his death, Kay among them.
After the cellphone expert came Dr. Marc Krouse, formerly with the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office, who performed Skaggs’ autopsy. He explained the autopsy process and talked about the levels of ethanol, fentanyl and oxycodone found in Skaggs’ system at the time of his death.
Krouse was fired last March, after an audit found errors in a handful of 2020 audits.