A jury was on track to find the Angels liable for tens of millions of dollars in the death of Tyler Skaggs — with one saying that “everyone” had failed the pitcher — before a settlement ended their deliberations.
The jurors had begun placing the blame for Skaggs’ 2019 death among multiple parties — the employee who gave him illicit drugs, the ball club, the pitcher’s family, and Skaggs himself — before learning the case was going to be taken out of their hands.
Jurors had reached a preliminary agreement of between $60 million to $80 million in economic damages, $10 million to $20 million in punitive damages, and $5 million to $15 million for loss of love as of Friday morning, Dec. 19, according to the jury foreman who declined to provide his full name.
“It’s safe to say all of us agreed that there was a shared percentage of everyone at fault,” the foreman said. “It was not one or two parties but all three.”
According to the foreman, the jury was leaning toward assigning 55% blame to the Angels and assigning Skaggs with the least amount, at 15%.
Those percentages would have been vital — because they would have determine how much of the financial damages the team would ultimately have to pay.
“A lot of it revolved around the Angels’ failure to adhere to their policies and procedures in their human resources department,” the foreman said. “We ultimately felt that the Angels were negligent, and they were at fault partially in this.”
For each finding, nine of the 12 jurors would have had to agree.
The foreman and fellow juror Jasson Thach, 20, said it stood out to the jury that the Angels’ human resources executives did not know their department’s policies while testifying in the mornings — but did after returning from lunch with their attorneys.
Thach said he believed Eric Kay — the Angel staffer who provided Skaggs opioids — attempted to help Skaggs in his own way, but failed by not involving the Angels’ HR department. That department didn’t even appear to follow its own policies, he added.
“Why pay the HR team if you’re not going to use your HR team?” Thach said.
The foreman said a recurring theme during deliberations was the need for the Angels to improve their internal processes.
“ ‘Do better’ — that was a term that came up a lot, that the Angels need to do better,” he said.
Thach said it wasn’t a particular piece of evidence or individual testimony that shaped the jury’s preliminary decisions, but rather what he described as the Angels’ repeated negligence.
“I feel everybody failed Tyler Skaggs — MLB (Major League Baseball), the players’ association and even Tyler Skaggs’ family,” Thach said.
However, there was some disagreement regarding exactly how much each party was liable for.
Tanya Josephs, 54, said that had the deliberations continued, there would have been a lot more “hammering out” amongst the jurors.
Josephs was one of four jurors who had been “in the middle” between siding with the plaintiffs or defendants throughout the trial, she said. She was initially on the fence, but was tilting toward the Skaggs family by the time deliberations were halted.
Josephs said she was personally considering 40% liability to the Angels and 40% liability to Kay.
Darryl Kinson, 64, however, said he was one of four jurors more on the defendant’s side than others. He had been leaning toward assigning Skaggs’ 50% responsibility and splitting the remainder evenly between the Angels and Kay, he said.
“It was the cumulative nature of the substances that were in his body, not one,” Kinson said. “Had it just been the fentanyl pill, then it would have been 50% Eric Kay, 50% Angels.”
Kinson is referring to the fentanyl, oxycodone, and alcohol that were all found in Skaggs’ system after his death.
Josephs, standing next to Kinson when talking to a reporter, countered that had Kay been fired by the organization — a step she believed the team should have taken — Skaggs may not have died.
“There were enough issues with Eric (Kay), if someone had instead of protecting him, and being his mentor, would have maybe thought, ‘OK, now I’ve seen enough from this guy. He needs help. Get him help,’ ” Josephs said.
“They were both concealing it,” Josephs added. “That was the hard part for us.”
What ultimately contributed to Josephs eventual tipping in favor of the plaintiffs was that, while the Angels higher-ups may not have known, she believed they should have been aware of what their employees were doing.
“You don’t have to know, but they should have known,” she said.
Attorneys for the Angels argued that Skaggs was responsible for his own death. The pitcher hid his drug addiction, the defense attorneys said, and he chose to crush and snort a pill of what he believed to be oxycodone — but that actually contained fentanyl combined with another opioid pill and alcohol.
The four jurors expressed their relief at the decision being taken out of their hands and finally being dismissed from duty after more than two months.