Former Angels employee Eric Kay sentenced to 22 years in Tyler Skaggs case

FORT WORTH - Eric Kay, the former communication director for the Los Angeles Angels, was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison after being convicted in February of providing the drugs that caused the 2019 death of pitcher Tyler Skaggs.

District Judge Terry Means said he went above the minimum 20 years Kay faced because of remarks he made in prison.

Prosecutors played a tape of a prison phone conversation in which Kay said of Skaggs: “I hope people realize what a piece of s—- he was… . Well, he’s dead, so f—- him.”

Means said he that he had been dreading sentencing Kay because he felt mandatory minimums were “excessive.” But the judge said that the prison conversations showed a “refusal to accept responsibility and even be remorseful for something you caused.”

In his own remarks, Kay apologized for having “spewed vitriol” about Skaggs, prosecutors and the jury, in that and other prison correspondence. “I wanted to blame Tyler for all of this,” Kay said, calling his words “so wrong and foul.”

The emotional sentencing hearing spelled a bleak end to this phase of a legal saga that began when Skaggs, 27, was found dead in a Southlake, Texas, hotel room July 1, 2019, with oxycodone and fentanyl in his system. Kay’s family has said he will appeal his conviction.

Kay was, like Skaggs, a user of illicit opioids. During Kay’s trial in February, witnesses including several Major League Baseball players said he shared black market pain pills with them, though there was no testimony that he did so for profit.

Federal prosecutor Erinn Martin claimed that Kay was in Skaggs’ hotel room when he choked on his own vomit - a contention based on key card evidence - and that he didn’t try to save the pitcher either because “he freaked out and decided to save himself and his job,” or because he was incapacitated himself. Martin said that Kay knew that the drugs he gave Skaggs were “likely or potentially counterfeit” and could contain fentanyl.

Kay, who did not take the stand in his own defense during the trial, did not directly address the government’s version of events on Tuesday but expressed remorse for his actions, blaming his addiction.

“I will spend the rest of my days in repair,” Kay said.

Skaggs’s mother and widow blamed Kay for the pitcher’s death in their own remarks in court Tuesday.

“Eric Kay knew that the drugs he was giving to my son and other players was laced with fentanyl,” said Skaggs’s mother, Debbie, adding that “a strict sentence … has the power to dissuade people from providing lethal drugs to others.”

“I feel strongly that those who risk the lives of others with killer drugs need to be held accountable,” Skaggs’s widow, Carli, said. “If anything good can come of Tyler’s death and this trial, it will be preventing someone else’s wife from receiving the call I did.”

Kay’s own family urged Judge Means to choose the minimum allowable sentence, and to send him to a prison close to them in Southern California. Kay has three sons, the youngest being 12 years old.

Skaggs’s family has also filed suit against Kay and the Angels, claiming that the team “knew or should have known” that Kay was a drug user, and that placing him in proximity to athletes playing through injuries created a “perfect storm” leading to the pitcher’s death.

Since Kay’s trial, one of his attorneys, Reagan Wynn, has been suspended from practicing law after a Texas bar panel found he “failed to explain” to another client the facts of his criminal case. In a May hearing in Kay’s case, his other attorney at the time, Michael Molfetta, appeared to blame Wynn for having left Kay without representation during a meeting with probation officers related to his sentencing.

“I was always a part of a group email with probation, and I wrongfully - and it is on me - just assumed Reagan was handling it,” Molfetta told a judge. “I would text Mr. Wynn and say, ‘Hey, you got this?’ And throughout the course of our representation, he apparently doesn’t like texts, because he never really got back to me.”

Molfetta has also since left the case. In an interview with The Washington Post, Sandra Kay said that her son had received a poor legal defense and that prosecutors had pushed a “false narrative,” and that they would be pursuing an appeal.

“Tyler Skaggs was an adult male who willfully chose to engage in dangerous behavior that ended in his death,” Sandra Kay said. “And to hold someone else accountable for that is a great injustice.”