Tyler Skaggs' legs and feet in cowboy boots hung off of his Southlake hotel room bed. Blood pooled inside his body at the right side of his face. He had no pulse.
A Los Angeles Angels traveling security guard who found the starting pitcher's body in July 2019 as the team was preparing to leave the Hilton hotel to play the Texas Rangers described on Wednesday from the witness stand the scene when he entered the player's room.
The testimony came on the second day of the trial of Eric Kay, a former Angels employee who managed the team's press department. Prosecutors allege that he provided Skaggs with a fentanyl-laced oxycodone tablet and that it killed him.
The security guard, Charles Knight, said the team's traveling secretary had asked him to check on Skaggs' welfare after the secretary heard from Skaggs' wife and another player that they could not reach him by telephone or by knocking on his room door.
Prosecutors have said vomit blocked Skaggs' ability to breathe, and showed photographs of his body and the room to jurors.
They contend that experts found that Skaggs, 27, would not have died but for ingesting fentanyl. Kay's defense attorneys told the jury that it is not possible to know that.
Skaggs' mother, Debbie Hetman, told the jury of times of joy at Skaggs' wedding about six months before he died and of when his wife called to tell her that he was dead. She said that she screamed.
"I just miss him so much," Hetman said. "It's horrible."
Skaggs' mother testified that several years before his death he developed a problem with the pain relief medication Percocet. He was determined to stop using it and did, she said. Later, when he had Tommy John ligament surgery and avoided the strongest painkilling drugs, she said.
Hetman flew with relatives from California to Texas the night she learned of her son's death. Hetman went to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office and saw his body before an autopsy and went to the Southlake Police Department to collect his belongings. There, police asked if they could review the contents of Skaggs' cellphone. Hetman said she thought she knew the passcode and successfully unlocked the phone. Her stepson then changed the passcode, she testified.
After returning to California and learning of the results of the autopsy and that he had ingested fentanyl, Hetman testified that she was angry.
"He did not know there was poison in that pill," she said.
Earlier Wednesday, a defense attorney appeared to try to establish that Skaggs could have had contact with many people beyond Kay at the ballpark on the day before his body was found and as he traveled.
The Angels had played the Oakland Athletics in a home game before players and other Angels employees boarded two buses for a charter flight to Dallas. For the series of games in Texas (the Angels later played in Houston) the Angels players wore cowboy hats and boots and posed for a photo on the tarmac.
After Skaggs' body was found, Angels employees and players gathered in a ballroom, and Southlake police officers asked them to describe what they knew.
In an opening statement on Tuesday, one of Kay's attorneys acknowledged that Kay lied when he told police that he had not seen Skaggs after they arrived at the hotel.
The trial is underway in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, where a jury of five men and 10 women are hearing the case. The jurors include three alternates.
The trial is expected to last seven days, with U.S. District Judge Terry Means allowing 20 hours of evidence presentation from prosecutors and 15 hours from the defense.
Kay, who has pleaded not guilty, rejected a plea offer in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Beran told Means at a pretrial conference. She did not describe the terms of the offer.
Kay was charged in July 2020. He is 47 and lives in Orange, California.
Inside of Skaggs' hotel room, investigators found pills, including one with the marking M/30. The pill, which resembled a 30-milligram oxycodone tablet, was tested, and it had been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate, according to an affidavit written by DEA agent Geoffrey Lindenberg that was filed with the expectation that it would support the criminal complaint in the case.
Kay is accused of regularly dealing the M/30 pills to Skaggs and to others, passing them out at the stadium where they worked. He is accused of dealing the drugs from 2017 until July 2019, according to the affidavit.
