DALLAS — Day three of testimony resumed in the trial for the former Los Angeles Angels employee accused of supplying the drugs that killed the team's pitcher, Tyler Skaggs.
Eric Prescott Kay faces charges of drug distribution and drug conspiracy in Skaggs’ death in the Dallas area in 2019. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in October 2020.
Federal prosecutors allege 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.
A majority of testimony on Thursday 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 did Skaggs’ autopsy. He explained the autopsy process and talked about the levels of ethanol, fentanyl and oxycodone that were 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. Skaggs died in 2019.
Prosecutors are trying to prove that there was "only one person was texting Tyler that night that he was coming to his room," and that Kay. But the defense said prosecutors can't prove Kay gave Skaggs the pills the day he died, and that the pitcher could have gotten the drugs from any number of people.
Already, Skaggs' mother and former teammates, including Andrew Heaney, currently with the L.A. Dodgers, have testified in the trial.
Heaney was the one who alerted the team that he could not reach Skaggs, leading hotel security to find him dead. Meanwhile, Skaggs' mother recalled that day as a "horrible" one.
"It was the worst day of my life. I was angry," she said. "I knew my son loved life and would not have wanted to die. He didn’t know there was poison in that pill that killed him. He might still be alive today if someone in that room could have helped save him.”
More baseball players are expected to testify over the coming days, and the trial is expected to continue through next week.