New court filings — including one posted in error — have revealed new details about Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who died following an overdose in 2019, and the team’s former communications director Eric Kay, now serving 22 years in prison for his role in Skaggs’ death.
The filings were submitted as part of a wrongful death civil lawsuit, which the Skaggs family filed against the Angels in June 2021 in state court in California. They are seeking $210 million in damages.
On May 30, the Angels filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the Skaggs’s claims should be dismissed. It contained a deposition from the former agent for Skaggs, in which he testified Skaggs had told him he sometimes received prescription drugs from pitcher Wade Miley. Skaggs and Miley were teammates on the Arizona Diamondbacks at the time, and Miley now pitches for the Cincinnati Reds.
In his deposition, Ryan Hamill, who is the co-lead of baseball for the Creative Artists Agency, said he became concerned with his client’s drug use in 2013. Hamill testified that he approached Skaggs’ family with concerns, and confronted Skaggs directly about his behavior.
“He came clean,” Hamill testified. “He said he had been using — I believe it was Percocets —and he said he got them through Wade Miley.”
Miley’s name also came up in the criminal proceedings brought against Kay. In a recorded prison phone call federal prosecutors filed as an exhibit for Kay’s sentencing hearing, Kay told his mother that Miley had been a drug source for Skaggs.
Miley, through his agent, declined to comment. He has not been charged with a crime or formally accused of any wrongdoing. Hamill also declined to comment.
Miley, a 15-year major league veteran, made his season debut for the Cincinnati Reds earlier this month. (Jason Miller/Getty Images)
Hundreds of pages of testimony, including portions of confidential depositions from key witnesses, were also posted publicly to the court’s online portal last week, apparently in error. The filings were from the Skaggs family’s lawyers as part of a motion for summary judgment, in support of the family’s attempt to demonstrate that multiple Angels employees, including high-level officials, were aware of Kay’s drug use and had reason to be aware that he was providing pills to Skaggs.
It is unclear what led to the documents from the Skaggs family being posted publicly. Depositions have typically been filed under seal in this case. In court on Monday, attorneys for the Angels accused the Skaggs side of posting the documents intentionally, which they denied.
“The documents were filed pursuant to California rules of the court and the existing protective order, and were designated to be conditionally filed under seal,” said a spokesperson for Rusty Hardin, the Skaggs family’s attorney.
The document was later removed from the court’s online portal, after The Athletic requested comment from attorneys representing both parties. Lawyers for the Angels then asked the court to prohibit The Athletic from reporting on their contents but the motion was denied by Judge Shaina H. Colover, citing the First Amendment.
“We are going to respect the Court’s prior order and not cite the wealth of evidence which counters (the Skaggs’ family’s) claims and supports the fact that the team is not responsible for Tyler’s passing,” said Todd Theodora of Theodora Oringher, legal counsel for Angels Baseball, when asked about these court filings.
There were more than 1,000 pages of documents posted by the two sides. Here is some of what was revealed.
Skaggs pursued pills from teammates
At the heart of the Angels’ defense argument is that Skaggs’ actions in procuring and ingesting the pills make him responsible for his own death.
“Under the law it is significant that Tyler Skaggs struggled with addiction for nearly a decade and knowingly used drugs from multiple different unsecured and illegal sources,” Theodora said.
In their motion for summary judgment, the Angels’ lawyers argued that “Skaggs’s undisputed, repeated misconduct — soliciting and using illegal opiates for almost a decade until they finally killed him — constitutes unclean hands that bars Plaintiffs’ negligence claims as a matter of law.”
Among the evidence they present for this argument are text messages between Skaggs and his teammates.
According to the court filings, in June of 2017, Skaggs texted then-Angels teammate Mike Morin, “Talked to EK (Eric Kay) can I buy one from you since you cleaned the guy out.” In June of 2019, just days before Skaggs’ death, Skaggs texted then-Angels teammate Matt Harvey, “Can I get 2 lol.”
During Kay’s criminal trial, four additional players (Cam Bedrosian, C.J. Cron, Harvey and Morin) testified to receiving pills from Kay, often with Skaggs operating as a liaison.
Skaggs, whose jersey the team wore in its first home game after his death, and Eric Kay, right, spent years together with the Angels. (John McCoy / Getty Images)
Skaggs’ mother, Debbie Hetman, testified at Kay’s criminal trial that Skaggs had abused Percocet in 2013.
Skaggs’ medical records in court documents indicate he was taking five Percocets a day, as of September 2013. Doctors’ notes state he began using the year prior. He was prescribed Suboxone, a medicine designed to treat opioid dependence.
The Angels’ filing also includes text messages between Skaggs and his then-girlfriend, Carli Skaggs, in 2015, in which he appears to discuss marijuana use and writes, seemingly jokingly, “I’m a drug addict lol.” The Angels presented this as evidence that Skaggs “knew the extent of his drug problem.”
Eric Kay’s ex-wife testifies about interactions with Angels employees
Camela Kay’s deposition on April 3, 2025, provided some of the most noteworthy testimony currently available in this case. Camela is the ex-wife of Eric Kay.
Her testimony in the Skaggs family’s filing described communications between herself and senior Angels employees, detailing to them her husband’s drug use and possible connection with Skaggs.
She testified that during a team road trip to New York in 2013, Eric revealed to her, former Angels VP for communications Tim Mead and Angels traveling secretary Tom Taylor that he was abusing Vicodin.
On Oct. 2, 2017, Kay’s family held an intervention for him, which Camela testified went poorly. Mead and Taylor, who were not at the intervention, came to the Kays’ home the day after, and tried to convince him to seek help.
Eric eventually told his two colleagues that he had pills in his house, Camela said, and they found those pills. She testified that there were six or seven small baggies of drugs, each containing approximately six white pills. Camela said this gave her concerns that “(Eric) was selling,” and that she believed it was to players, though she said she did not share that with Mead or Taylor at the time.
Mead, who no longer works for the team, declined to comment, but has previously told reporters that “I have had a lot of conversations with Eric Kay about a lot of things, but opioids and Tyler Skaggs were not one of them.” Taylor, who still works for the Angels, declined comment.
Witnesses testified in Kay’s criminal trial that on Easter of 2019 he was acting erratically at work. Taylor suggested he follow Kay home in his car, after Kay decided to leave work early. Kay stopped at a CVS on the way home; Taylor eventually followed him inside, and testified he saw more erratic behavior from Kay.
Kay would eventually be hospitalized. Camela testified that the incident led her to call Taylor that evening to express concerns that Skaggs was involved in purchasing pills from Eric.
“I told him that Kelly (Eric’s sister) had said he told her those pills were for Tyler,” Camela testified that she told Taylor.
The lawyer then asks if she said Tyler, or Tyler Skaggs.
“I said Tyler Skaggs.”
Sandy Kay, Eric’s mother, testified that she told Mead at the hospital that evening that Kay had been receiving texts from Tyler Skaggs, though she also said that Mead didn’t acknowledge her comment.
In September 2019, Southlake PD conducted an interview with Kay, ahead of his eventual indictment. Informal police notes taken during that interview, included in the Skaggs family’s filing, seem to describe Kay saying that he had talked to Mead, his boss at the time, about his dynamic with Skaggs.
Theodora, the Angels attorney, said that the team will refute this: “The evidence will show that neither Tom Taylor nor Tim Mead were aware of Tyler Skaggs’ opioid use prior to his death.”
Knowledge of Kay’s addiction and concern about his behavior
At the heart of the Skaggs family’s argument is the allegation that Kay’s addiction was known to multiple people within the Angels organization.
Court filings by lawyers for the Skaggs family showcase numerous texts between Camela Kay, Mead and Taylor, with Mead regularly checking in about Eric and coordinating help with a team doctor.
In an April 2019 text message to Camela and Taylor — sent after Kay’s incident on Easter Sunday — Tim Mead wrote that he had spoken to Angels team doctor Erik Abell and benefits coordinator Cecilia Schneider about Kay’s hospitalization. In March 2015, Kay wrote in an email to someone whose identity has been redacted that he was doing “a private rehab with a team doc.”
Confidential deposition testimony from fellow Angels’ communications representatives indicate there was concern among fellow employees over Kay’s conduct. At the time, Kay managed Grace McNamee, Matt Birch and Adam Chodzko.
McNamee, an Angels communications employee, testified in her October 2024 deposition that she witnessed Kay struggling to stay awake in the press box during a 2018 game in Seattle. She testified that she and fellow communications employee Matt Birch contacted Taylor, the traveling secretary, to escort Kay to the clubhouse. Birch largely confirmed this account.
McNamee later testified that she expressed concern to Chodzko, also in the Angels communications department. The two had a conversation on June 30, 2019, the day the Angels left for the Texas road trip, where Skaggs would ultimately overdose.
“Treatment is a process,” she testified, noting that, at the time, she didn’t know if he had been treated for drug abuse. “So I thought that perhaps he needed to stay home.”
Angels team president John Carpino testified on Feb. 26, 2025, in his deposition, part of the unsealed testimony, that he did not know that Kay had been to drug treatment rehabilitation in May 2019; he said he only knew that Kay was on medical leave. Carpino, who was Kay’s direct superior at the time his treatment ended, testified that it was his decision to send Kay to Texas.
The Athletic’s Nathan Fenno contributed reporting to this story.
