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The ex-wife of former Los Angeles Angels communications director Eric Kay testified on Monday in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of late Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs. During her testimony, Camela Kay said she saw players and clubhouse attendants passing around pills on the team’s private plane.
27-year-old Tyler Skaggs was found unresponsive in his hotel room while traveling with the team to Texas in 2019. An autopsy report later confirmed that Skaggs choked on his on vomit after taking fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol.
In August of 2020, Eric Kay was charged with distributing fentanyl in connection with the Tyler Skaggs’ death which resulted in him being sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. The Los Angeles Angels maintain that they had no knowledge of Skagg’s history of opioid use.
Tyler Skaggs’ family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Angels in June of 2021, seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages and lost earnings. The case is now in court. Camela Kay’s testimony came just a few days after Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout took the stand last Thursday.
Camela Kay’s testimony differs from that given by Angels’ employees
During her testimony, The Athletic reports that Camela Kay noted that she did not want to be in court, but was forced to be there under subpoena.
When asked by the Skaggs family’s attorney Leah Graham if her ex-husband Eric Kay had told her in 2017 that players were passing out medication on the plane, she replied that he had. When asked if she personally had seen players passing around pills, she replied, “They’re treated like kings,” and that she “had seen them passing out pills and drinking excessively.” Specifically, she said the pills were Xanax and Percocet.
However, when asked a second time if she had seen players exchanging pills on the team plane, Camela Kay answered, “No. They keep you away, but you can see what’s going on behind you. When you get up to go to the bathroom.”
In another part of her testimony, her statements ran counter to those previously given by former Angels VP for communications Tim Mead and current traveling secretary Tom Taylor. She claimed that they were aware of her ex-husband’s drug addiction and that in 2017 Mead had even found approximately 60 pills split up into six or seven baggies in a shoebox owned by Eric Kay.
She claims the two Angels employees confronted her ex-husband with the plastic baggies. “Him being in the clubhouse with the players, my guess would be he is supplying to them,” the New York Post reports she testified. Mead and Taylor both denied knowledge of those events ever happening.
Camela Kay also testified that following an overdose by her ex-husband, which doctors diagnosed as involving six different drugs, Eric told her a bottle with blue pills inside that she had found were for Tyler Skaggs. She added that she found text messages on Eric’s phone about him getting his “candy” at the stadium. She then says she informed both Mead and Taylor.