The wife of Tyler Skaggs denied knowing that the 27-year-old pitcher had a drug problem prior to his shocking 2019 death in a Texas hotel room as she testified Monday, Nov. 17 in the trial of wrongful death lawsuit against the Los Angeles Angels that the widow described as having consumed her life.
An often-emotional Carli Skaggs — who has spent every day of a civil trial that is now entering a sixth week sitting in the front row of the courtroom gallery — took the stand in to describe her relationship with Tyler and her desire for the ballclub he played for to be “held accountable for their actions and inactions.”
“I don’t want anyone to go through what I’m going through,” Carli Skaggs said when asked why she wanted to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the team. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”
“Are you angry at the Angels?” asked Shawn Holley, one of the attorneys representing the Skaggs family.
“Yes,” Carli Skaggs replied.
“Are you angry at Tyler?” the attorney asked.
“Yes,” the widow said. “It is extremely difficult for me to be angry at the person I love most in this world, and he isn’t here for me to talk to.”
Eric Kay, a former communications staffer for the Angels, is serving prison time for providing Tyler Skaggs with a counterfeit pill containing fentanyl that, when mixed with Oxycodone and alcohol, led to the pitcher’s death. Jurors in the current civil trial will have to decide team officials knew, or at least should have known, that Kay was providing opioid pills to players.
Both Tyler and Carli grew up in Santa Monica and attended the same schools, though since Carli is four and a half years older than Tyler the two didn’t meet until they both ended up at a home of one of Carli’s friends several years after high school. Carli said she could tell that Tyler was immediately interested in her, but she initially thought he was too young. But even after Tyler had to leave Southern California to play for the Arizona Diamondbacks, the two stayed in touch through constant texts, she testified.
Carli fought back tears as she recalled the Thanksgiving Day in 2014 when Tyler sat her down on her bed and asked to be her boyfriend.
“He took my hands and looked me in the eyes and told me what I meant to him,” she said.
Tyler Skaggs was traded to the Angels a month later, in December 2013. Nearly four years later, in November 2017, Carli said Tyler during a trip to Bora Bora brought her to a private area where there was a table and rose petals in the shape of a heart set up, got down on his knees and proposed.
“I couldn’t believe he pulled that off, to be honest,” she laughed during her testimony.
Carli said Tyler would call her father before games he pitched to talk about his plan for opposing hitters. And she said her grandmother would write a poem about every game Tyler played.
It wasn’t until near a year after they started dating that Carli said she learned that Tyler had battled an addiction to Percocet during his time with the Diamondbacks. In August 2014, while Tyler was recovering from Tommy John surgery, Carli recalled his mother making an off-hand comment about not wanting him to use painkillers due to his previous issues.
The two of them smoked marijuana, Carli testified, which he eventually grew out of and she curtailed when they decided to start a family. But other than taking a single Ecstasy pill that someone gave to him on their honeymoon, Carli said she was unaware that Tyler took any illicit drugs.
Carli Skaggs acknowledged that she learned after her husband’s death that he had been using opioids. Attorneys for the Angels allege that Skaggs went to Kay for the illicit pills and told other players that the staffer could get opioids for them.
“In hindsight, now that you know that (he was using opioids), when you look back at your relationship are you able to think of any occasion when you thought ‘Oh, that makes sense, that is what it must have been?’” Holley asked.
“No,” Carli Skaggs replied. “And I have racked my brain for something I could have missed.”
An attorney for the Angels asked Carli Skaggs if she ever learned that Tyler had snorted cocaine during his bachelor party in Las Vegas in November 2018. She responded that she learned there was cocaine at the party, but didn’t know if Tyler used it.
Jurors were also shown a text message Tyler Skaggs sent a teammate in which he appeared to reference ingesting an Oxycodone pill. “Haha I’m about to crush a blue right now,” he wrote, followed by “Now that Carlie isn’t here.”
“Would you have tried to get him help, if you knew then what you know now?” Angels attorney Elizabeth Lachman asked.
“Absolutely,” Carlie Skaggs replied.
Carli Skaggs recalled being informed by Angels officials that her husband had died and realizing “My life was never going to be the same,” and describe the call she made to Tyler’s mother informing her of the death as “The worst phone call I’ve ever made.” She also recalled traveling to Texas and seeing her husband’s body in the morgue.
“I didn’t want to see him, but I had to because I had to know it was real,” she said. “The love of my life, my best friend, was lying there on a gurney, lifeless.”
Carli, now 38, described spending much of her time focused on volunteer work. The Tyler Skaggs Foundation, which Carli founded with Skaggs’ family, supports young athletes. And Carli said she volunteers as a victim advocate with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and is part of a search and rescue team that works with the Los Angeles Police Department to locate people with diminished mental capacities.
But Carli said the litigation against the Angels has “consumed my life,” and added that she has not been in a serious relationship since Tyler’s death.
“I’m terrified to be deeply in love with someone, because I’m scared to lose them,” Carli said. “I don’t have the capacity to deal with any more pain.”
Members of the Angels front office who worked with Kay — including those on the organization’s communications and human resources teams — have denied knowing that Kay was an opioid addict or providing pills to Skaggs and other players. But several members of the clubhouse have testified that Kay’s drug issues were well known, and Kay’s ex-wife said the team was warned that Kay was distributing drugs prior to Skaggs’ death.
Testimony in the trial continues on Tuesday.