{"id":47497,"date":"2026-04-07T21:40:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T21:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/04\/07\/lawyer-says-angels-has-stopped-paying-jailed-employee-eric-kays-legal-fees\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T21:40:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T21:40:38","slug":"lawyer-says-angels-has-stopped-paying-jailed-employee-eric-kays-legal-fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/04\/07\/lawyer-says-angels-has-stopped-paying-jailed-employee-eric-kays-legal-fees\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawyer says Angels has stopped paying jailed employee Eric Kay’s legal fees"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

\n

The Angels stopped paying legal fees for jailed former communications executive Eric Kay after the team reached a settlement with the family of slain pitcher Tyler Skaggs in December.<\/p>\n

In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorney David Gerger said he was withdrawing from representing Kay, who was convicted of providing Skaggs with the drugs that killed the ball player. <\/p>\n

“A third party that had agreed to pay her legal fees and costs has refused to pay, leaving Kay’s current attorney with over $130,000 in fees and out-of-pocket expenses,” Gerger wrote.<\/p>\n

The third party is the Angels, who admitted during the Skaggs family’s wrongful death civil suit that they had been paying Kay’s legal fees for months. The case settled on December 19 during jury deliberations, although terms of the settlement, which followed 31 days of testimony and years of legal wrangling, have not been disclosed.<\/p>\n

Attorneys for the Skaggs family expressed concern when they learned a few months before the trial that Gerger was being paid by the Angels, writing in a court filing, “Since his termination, the Angels have distanced themselves from Kay. The Angels have now reversed course.”<\/p>\n

Kay Skaggs is serving a 22-year sentence for supplying counterfeit pain pills that contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. Skaggs, 27, inhaled the pill and died of suffocation on his own vomit in a Texas hotel room on July 1, 2019. what was pleaded guilty <\/a>2022 delivery of a controlled substance resulting in death and conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute a controlled substance.<\/p>\n

Kay’s appeal was rejected by a federal court in November 2023 in a brief four-page decision. He argued that the evidence at trial was insufficient to sustain a conviction or to show that the proper venue for the trial was Texas. Kay also challenged the propriety of statements made by the prosecutor during his closing arguments.<\/p>\n

Engels declined to comment on Gerger’s court filing, in which he wrote that Engels had offered to pay Kay’s legal bills in November 2024 and had done so for the next eight months. <\/p>\n

The payments stopped when the judge in the Skaggs family’s civil case made a pre-trial ruling that both sides must accept Kay’s conviction and the facts established in his criminal proceedings. In other words, the Angels essentially could not retry the criminal case against Kay, eliminating their need to keep Kay’s appeal effort alive. <\/p>\n

Gerger never received payment after the judge’s ruling.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Angels stopped paying legal fees for jailed former communications executive Eric Kay after the team reached a settlement with the family of slain pitcher Tyler Skaggs in December. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorney David Gerger said he was withdrawing from representing Kay, who was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[7296,2741,4661,5249,3076,17646,3463,780,7125,1651],"class_list":["post-47497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bible-verse","tag-angels","tag-employee","tag-eric","tag-fees","tag-jailed","tag-kays","tag-lawyer","tag-legal","tag-paying","tag-stopped"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47502,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47497\/revisions\/47502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}