In the civil trial for the death of Tyler Skaggs, pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, Debbie Hetman, the player’s mother and one of the plaintiffs, testified on Monday. She stated that she did not know if her son had informed the team about his drug addiction, but that the organization never asked her any questions about it.
Hetman stated that, had she been consulted, she would have revealed to the Angels that Skaggs developed an addiction to Percocet after the 2013 season. She recounted that her son asked her for help at that time. The Angels acquired Skaggs before the 2014 season.
The Angels’ defense has maintained that they were unaware of Skaggs’ drug problems, arguing that responsibility for his death lies with his personal decisions to mix alcohol and opioids, which resulted in an accidental fentanyl overdose in a Texas hotel room in 2019.
On Monday’s session, both Hetman and Carli Skaggs, Tyler’s widow, gave an emotional testimony.
Hetman explained how Skaggs approached her and her stepfather after the 2013 season, when he played for the Arizona Diamondbacks, to confess his addiction to Percocet. Together, they sought specialized medical and psychiatric help for addictions.
He described that his son was undergoing drug tests, as part of his medical plan and at the insistence of his mother, even the following summer, to make sure he stayed clean. By then, he had already been traded to the Angels. Hetman believed his son was doing well after the 2013 admission, because he looked more like himself than the “very somber and lost” person he saw after the 2013 season.
As a parent, you want to make sure your child is on the right track. And that they recover and don’t fall back into the same pattern of consumption.
Hetman also revealed that he spoke with Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who performed Skaggs’ Tommy John surgery in 2014, about his son’s problem with Percocet and requested that he prescribe different painkillers. In addition, he communicated the situation to Skaggs’ agents and had an informal conversation with Carli, his then-girlfriend, about it.
Carli Skaggs testified on Monday that she did not delve into the subject with the family or with her future husband. The main plaintiff denied knowing that her husband had a drug problem or that he used illegal pills before his death in 2019. The only drugs she knew he used were marijuana and ecstasy, once, during their honeymoon, she affirmed.
In an uncomfortable interrogation, the defense attorney asked Carli Skaggs if she felt her husband needed help for drug rehabilitation. She replied no. Carli Skaggs also testified that it seemed out of place that Skaggs would ask former communications employee Eric Kay for drugs after Kay left rehabilitation in 2019.
Kay was convicted in federal court in 2022 for providing Skaggs with the pill that killed him and is serving a 22-year prison sentence. Several players testified during the criminal trial that Kay provided them with pills.
Carli Skaggs offered a moving testimony about her relationship with Skaggs, how she learned of his death, and the six years that have passed since then. The Angels’ general manager, Billy Eppler, was the one who broke the news to her.
She described the call as “the worst phone call I’ve ever made.” The family traveled to Texas and Carli Skaggs reported seeing her husband at the coroner’s office.
“I didn’t want to see him, but I had to because I needed to know it was real, that he was really gone,” said Carli Skaggs. “As painful as it was, I needed it. I was in this cold, white room and the love of my life, my best friend, was lying there lifeless on a stretcher, and I had spoken to him the day before.”
He stated that he wanted to give her one last kiss “even though it scared me”.
Six years later, she asks herself “is this real?”. She described the difficulties in establishing new relationships and seeing friends with children because it is “a reminder of what I don’t have”.
In the last few days before her father passed away last year, Carli Skaggs said she held his hand while listening to the deposition testimony about her husband’s death with headphones.
The trial, he assured, has “consumed my life”.
