Ex-Wife of Angels Employee Testifies During Tyler Skaggs Trial that Players Partied with Pills on Team Plane

The wife of a former L.A. Angels team employee testified Monday during the civil trial concerning the overdose death of pitcher Tyler Skaggs that she saw players and other team employees passing around booze and pills on a team flight just before Skaggs was found dead. Former Angels employee Eric Kay’s ex-wife, Camela, told the court that she was a passenger on a team flight just before Skaggs died from an overdose and that she saw the pitcher and others on the flight partying, playing card games, gambling, and drinking, the New York Post reported. Eric Kay was convicted in 2022 of supplying the drugs that led to Skaggs’ 2019 death and was sentenced to 22 years in prison. His actions are also key in the ongoing wrongful death trial underway in Santa Ana, California, filed by Skaggs’ family. “They’re treated like kings,” Camela said of what she saw transpire on the team plane. “I had seen them passing out pills or drinking alcohol excessively.” The Skaggs family claims that the team is liable for the player’s death because they were well aware of all the constant partying going on. But the team counters that they certainly had no knowledge of the drug abuse and that whatever occurred between Skaggs and Kay was private and not on team time. Camela testified that her family became worried that Eric had a drug problem and had staged an intervention back in 2017. She also says that she saw team officials had removed several small baggies of pills from her husband’s bedroom. She added that she worried that Eric was selling the drugs to players, too. “Him being in the clubhouse with the players, my guess would be he is supplying to them,” she told the court. Camela also recounted how Eric was driven home by team employees after he was acting erratically in the offices in 2019, and that she discovered several different pills in his possession and made him go to the hospital, where he was diagnosed as having six different drugs in his system. Eric was hospitalized for three days at that point and then went to rehab. She says the team was fully aware of all this. She further claimed that Eric admitted to his sister that some of the drugs were meant to be purchased by Skaggs, and she worried that Eric would relapse right back into his behavior if he went back to work, worries she says she told team officials all about. Camela said that Skaggs’ death was the final straw, and she divorced Eric. Skaggs’ family is seeking $118 million in lost earnings over the 27-year-old’s 2019 death in a trial expected to take up to three weeks. The player’s death spurred the league to reach a deal with the players’ union to launch a regime of testing players for opioids and to create a treatment plan for those who test positive. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston