Cesar Cobo | June 3, 2026 | Negligence, News, Wrongful Death
He was 27 years old, a left-handed starting pitcher, a year away from the kind of contract that takes care of your kids and your kids’ kids. On the night of July 1, 2019, he was alone in a hotel room in Texas while the team was in town for a road series, and he never woke up.
The coroner’s report reads the way those reports always read, flat and clinical and unbearable. Fentanyl, oxycodone, and alcohol in his system. He had snorted a single counterfeit oxycodone pill, the kind mass-produced to look exactly like real medicine and laced with something that isn’t. He choked on his own vomit while he was unconscious. That is how Tyler Skaggs died.
The lawsuit that followed is the part worth sitting with, especially if you have lost someone the same way. It didn’t chase the man who handed him the pill. It went after his employer, the Los Angeles Angels. And on the verge of a jury verdict, the team settled on confidential terms rather than let twelve strangers put a number on what their pitcher’s life was worth.
If your gut just said something like but he took it himself, so how is that anybody else’s fault, that is a fair instinct. Hold onto it, because it is the exact reflex the insurance company is counting on you never getting past.
As Augusta wrongful death lawyers, we do a lot of this work, and we will be straight with you all the way through, including the parts that are hard to hear. If you are reading this after losing someone, you have probably had enough people be gentle and vague with you already. By the end you will know what actually decides these cases in Georgia, what quietly destroys them, and whether your situation is worth a phone call.
Your Gut Says It Was His Fault. The Law Sees It Differently.
Almost every family hits the same wall. He made his own choice, he took the drug himself, so how could anyone else possibly be on the hook?
But the law looks at this differently than your gut does. A wrongful death claim never required your loved one to be a saint. It only requires that someone else’s negligence helped cause the death, and those are two very different standards.
A person can make a terrible decision and still be the foreseeable casualty of someone else’s failure to do their job. The law has a word for people who fail to do their job and get someone killed in the process. The word is negligent, and in the right case it costs them.
The whole fight is figuring out who that someone else is, what they owed your loved one, and whether they failed. In an overdose case the hard part is rarely proving the death. It is proving the duty, and that is the first thing we sort out when a family comes to us.
Why Suing the Dealer Is Usually a Waste of Everyone’s Time
You probably had an uncle like this. The second another car drifted an inch toward his, he would mutter, “Oh, I’m about to own me a Mercedes,” as if a fender-bender were a winning lottery ticket and he would be driving home in the other guy’s car.
He was wrong, of course, and understanding why he was wrong is the single most important thing to understand about overdose cases.
In the Skaggs case the dealer wasn’t some shadow on a street corner. It was Eric Kay, the Angels’ director of communications, a man who had worked for the team for more than two decades. A federal jury convicted him of drug distribution resulting in death, and he was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison.
So why not just sue him?
Because a conviction and a check are two completely different things.
You can win a hundred-million-dollar verdict against a man with no insurance and walk out of that courtroom with nothing but a piece of paper and a fresh wound. Most people’s biggest asset is their house, and between bankruptcy protection and a mortgage that already swallows most of the equity, an individual can hand you a stunning verdict and keep right on walking while your judgment quietly turns into wallpaper. Your uncle never owned that Mercedes, and he was never going to.
Nobody warns families about this, and it is the first hard question we have to answer. Is there a defendant who can actually make this right? The person most directly responsible is very often the one least able to pay. The dealer is broke, or about to be, while the corporation behind him is not. That isn’t a loophole and it isn’t greedy. It is the entire reason third-party liability exists. You go where a real legal duty and the actual means to satisfy a judgment overlap, which usually means an employer, a property owner, or a business carrying insurance.
Four Words That Win or Lose the Whole Case
Almost everything in one of these cases comes down to four words, whether the defendant knew or should have known about the danger.
The theory against the Angels was never that the team sold the pill. It was negligent retention and supervision, the idea that when you keep a dangerous person in a job that gives him access to vulnerable people, despite every warning sign, you own a piece of what happens next.
The warning signs here were not subtle. Kay had overdosed and been hospitalized. He had been through rehab. Testimony described his home as full of drugs, and he allegedly told a team vice president, years before Skaggs died, that he had used drugs with players.
Then there was the behavior that makes a jury physically recoil, the erratic clubhouse antics that had people throwing fastballs at him for laughs and, by one account, watching him eat a pimple off a teammate’s back. Pick whichever detail turns your stomach, because that is the point. A reasonable employer does not look at a man like that and decide to keep him close to the players.
No company ever admits any of this, of course. Nobody settles into a deposition chair and volunteers that yes, they knew, and honestly they thought it was kind of funny. The knowledge case is almost never sitting in a folder waiting to be found. It gets built one sworn witness at a time, in discovery, which is the part of this work we genuinely love.
You put people under oath and let the picture assemble itself. One coworker remembers something, then a second backs it up, then a supervisor who can’t quite recall gets contradicted by three people who can.
The more voices that independently say everybody knew what this man was, the more absurd it sounds when management insists they had no idea. Juries think like normal people, and if the whole clubhouse could see it, “the front office didn’t know” stops sounding like a defense and starts sounding like a choice not to look.
That kind of digging has to start while the trail is still warm. Memories fade, people move out of state, and records have a way of going missing. It is the whole reason the families who do best are usually the ones who call sooner rather than later.
The Speed Demon in the Moving Van
Set baseball aside for a second.
Say you run a moving company here in Georgia and you hire a driver. His buddies call him Speed, and not because he is slow. You pull his record and see five speeding tickets, which seems like no big deal. What you don’t bother to dig up is that those five were only the out-of-state ones, and the full picture is thirty-six speeding tickets and ten at-fault wrecks. You put him behind the wheel of a box truck anyway, because he is cheap. One Tuesday afternoon he tries to beat a yellow light, runs the red instead, and kills a mother of two.
Her family doesn’t only have a case against Speed. They have a case against you. You profited from his work, you had a duty to vet and supervise him, and you put a known hazard in a two-ton truck and aimed it at the public.
That is negligent hiring and entrustment, and the bones of it are identical to the Skaggs case. Swap the truck for a clubhouse and the reckless driver for a man dealing fentanyl out of a stadium, and the law does not blink. The question is always whether this was the kind of disaster a careful business should have seen coming a mile away.
The 50% Cliff That Blindsides Georgia Families
Pay close attention here, because Georgia families get blindsided by this rule more than any other. The Skaggs case played out in California, and on the single issue that matters most in an overdose claim, California and Georgia are not the same. The difference can end your case before it ever really starts.
Both states use comparative negligence, which means a jury divides the blame among everyone involved, the man who snorted the pill, the dealer who supplied it, and the organization that let the whole thing fester. Each one is assigned a percentage. If the case is worth $100 million and the team is found 20 percent at fault, the team pays $20 million.
California uses what is called pure comparative negligence, so a plaintiff who is 90 percent to blame can still collect the other 10 percent. Georgia slams that door shut. Under Georgia’s apportionment statute, we are a modified comparative negligence state with a 50 percent bar, which means that if your loved one is found 50 percent or more responsible for their own death, your family recovers nothing at all.
Sit with what that means in an overdose case. The defense’s entire strategy is to pile the fault onto the one person in the room who can no longer speak for himself, arguing that he sought out the drug, knew the risk, and ignored every warning.
Every closing argument becomes some version of he did this to himself. If they can push that number to 50 percent, the case dies, no matter how reckless the employer was or how many warning signs it ignored.
That is exactly the fight you do not want to take on alone, and it is where an experienced firm earns its keep. The craft of it is moving blame off the person who cannot defend himself and onto the party that knew or should have known.
In Georgia, doing that well is not about squeezing out a bigger settlement. It is about clearing the 50 percent bar at all, because just below the bar a family recovers in proportion and at the bar it recovers nothing.
What Is a Life Actually Worth?
People imagine that a lawyer pulls a number for a human life out of thin air. The reality is more structured, and more human, than that. In Georgia the recovery runs through two separate channels, and when a grieving family is sitting across from us, something usually shifts in the room the moment we explain it.
The first is the wrongful death claim, and it belongs to the family. Georgia measures it as the full value of the life of the deceased. It is worth reading that phrase slowly, because it is the value of the life, not the value of the death.
You are not putting a price on a funeral. You are accounting for an entire future that was supposed to keep happening and instead got erased, the birthdays and the phone calls, the version of this person at forty and at sixty, the weight of who they were to the people who loved them. All of that counts, and it is not limited to lost paychecks, though the paychecks count too.
The second claim is the one almost no family sees coming. It is the survival claim, sometimes called the estate claim, and it compensates the conscious pain and suffering your loved one endured while they were actually dying, which is a fundamentally different claim than the wrongful death action itself. The law here is stark and oddly merciful at the same time. Five seconds of suffering counts, and so does an hour.
Picture it honestly for a moment. Someone is struck by a car and thrown into a ditch that has flooded with rainwater, pinned under metal, still conscious, face down in cold water and breathing it in, clawing for an inch of air that is not there in the last moments of a life.
There is no gentle way to write that, and there shouldn’t be. If you had to choose a way to go, you would pay everything you own not to go like that, and the law understands that the dying itself, that specific terror, is a harm all its own. That is what the survival claim is for. In a strange way it is the law’s acknowledgment that the last minutes mattered, and most families have no idea the claim even exists until a lawyer tells them.
A Year From the Money
Then there is the cold arithmetic, and Skaggs is a brutal example of it.
He was twenty-seven, in the prime of a starting pitcher’s career, and one season away from free agency. In baseball you grind through your early pre-arbitration years on a relative pittance, then earn arbitration raises, and then, if you are good, you finally reach the one enormous contract every player chases his whole career.
Skaggs was good, with a couple of above-average seasons behind him, and his next contract alone projected into nine figures before you even got to endorsements or a second career in a broadcast booth.
Baseball is unusual in a way that actually helps these calculations, because it offers hundreds of comparable players with near-identical statistics and publicly known salaries. For a plumber or a teacher you find a handful of comparisons and argue over them, but for a pitcher you can line up decades of them and simply point.
That is why his family was able to put a hard number on the loss. They valued his lost future earnings at $118 million, and that figure came before a dime of punitive damages. When a family can document that kind of exposure on a single slice of the case, the other side does not get to wave it away.
Why the Angels Folded, and What It Tells You About Your Case
People are often stunned that a case can settle after months of trial, sometimes after nothing more than a single sentence of an opening statement. It happens because a trial is a live, running bet for both sides, and the odds move with every hour of testimony.
In Georgia that math recently got more lopsided. As part of the tort reform passed in 2025, certain injury trials can now be bifurcated, meaning split in two. In the first phase the jury decides fault and nothing else. They do not hear about the injuries, the medical bills, the suffering, or the damages, and only after they have assigned blame does the case move to a second phase about what it is all worth.
Lawyers and judges across the state are still working out how this is supposed to function, because you are required to prove causation in the first phase while being discouraged from showing the jury the very evidence that makes causation feel real.
It is clumsy and it is new, and there is no point pretending about who it was built for. It hands defendants and their insurers a clean shot at a no-liability verdict before a jury ever learns how badly someone was hurt, and it lets them run a cold risk assessment the instant fault is decided. It was sold as tort reform on behalf of the everyday citizen, which you are allowed to read with an eyebrow raised.
That same instinct for certainty is what ended the Skaggs case. After a three-month trial the jury was already behind closed doors deliberating, and when jurors started sending out questions that hinted the verdict might break the family’s way, the Angels did not wait around to find out.
They settled on confidential terms rather than hand twelve strangers the final word on a number that could have run into the hundreds of millions. It was the bird in the hand, and certainty was the only thing the Angels could afford to buy at that point.
The same calculation lands on ordinary families, which is exactly why it matters to you. Say we believe a case is worth $150,000 and the current offer is $130,000. We can probably get to $150,000 if we push, but pushing might mean another eighteen months, three doctors’ depositions, court reporters, transcripts, and maybe $10,000 out of pocket, and even then the other side still gets to appeal.
Once you net all of that out, the extra $20,000 starts to shrink. We lay that out honestly every time, including a candid read on what wrongful death cases like yours actually tend to settle for, and then we let you decide, because it is your case and your peace and not ours. A firm that only ever tells you to keep swinging is not protecting you. It is protecting its own ego.
The Mistakes That Quietly Kill These Cases
You don’t have to do anything dramatic to lose a winnable case. You only have to wait too long, or trust the wrong person to handle it. A few of the quiet killers show up again and again.
- The clock. Georgia generally gives families two years to file, which feels like forever and is not. The deadline can also shift, and sometimes pause, when a related criminal prosecution is running alongside the civil case, the way Eric Kay’s was. Those rules are technical and easy to trip over.
- The evidence going cold. Toxicology reports, autopsy findings, text messages, internal records, and the coworkers who saw everything are all most accessible right now, and harder to reach with every month that passes.
- Talking to the insurer or investigators alone. The other side starts building its he-did-this-to-himself case immediately, and anything you say can be shaped to push your loved one’s share of the fault toward that 50 percent cliff.
- Assuming there is no case because the dealer is broke. That single assumption leaves real claims against the employer, the property owner, or the business that should have known buried and unfiled.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
If you have read this far, something about your own situation probably still feels unanswered, and that nagging feeling is usually worth more than the voice that has been telling you to let it go.
You do not need to know whether you have a case, because that is our job. You do not need a perfect set of facts lined up, and you do not need to decide anything today. You only need someone who handles Georgia wrongful death claims, who understands the 50 percent trap, who knows how to build the knew-or-should-have-known case before the witnesses scatter, and who knows how to find the defendant who can actually answer for what happened, to take an honest look while there is still time to act.
We will give you the truth even when the truth is that you do not have a case, because you deserve to hear that from someone who actually looked rather than from your own grief.
And whatever you decide about a lawsuit, if you or someone in your family is still caught in the grip of this, you do not have to white-knuckle it alone. SAMHSA’s free and confidential National Helpline, at 1-800-662-HELP, answers around the clock, every day of the year.
Contact Hawk Law now. The conversation is free and confidential, and it commits you to nothing except finally getting a real answer about whether the person you lost deserves one.
FAQ
Can I sue if my family member died from drugs they took voluntarily?
Often, yes. A wrongful death claim does not require your loved one to be blameless. It requires that someone else’s negligence helped cause the death. The harder questions are who else is responsible, and how much fault a Georgia jury places on the person who died, because Georgia bars recovery entirely once the deceased is 50 percent or more at fault.
Who can be held liable in an overdose death besides the dealer?
Depending on the facts, it can be an employer, a property owner, a treatment facility, or any business that had a duty to supervise or protect and that knew or should have known about a danger it ignored. The dealer is frequently the least collectible defendant, which is the whole reason third-party liability matters.
What does “knew or should have known” actually mean?
It is the standard for holding someone responsible for a foreseeable harm. A defendant does not have to confess that they knew, because liability can attach when a reasonable person in their position would have seen the danger. It is usually proven in discovery, through depositions and documents, rather than through an admission.
How is a life valued in a Georgia wrongful death case?
Through two separate tracks. The wrongful death claim, brought by the family, covers the full value of the life, including its intangible worth and not only lost income. A separate survival or estate claim covers the conscious pain and suffering the person experienced before death. Future earnings, life expectancy, and the family’s bond with the deceased all factor in.
How long do I have to file in Georgia?
Generally two years, though it is not always that simple. Certain circumstances, including a related criminal prosecution of the person who caused the death, can affect or even pause the clock. Because the rules are technical, it is worth confirming your specific deadline with an attorney early.
Why would a defendant settle when it might still win?
Once fault starts to look likely, a defendant runs the numbers. Facing open-ended damages, a known and survivable settlement is often worth more than gambling on what a jury might award, which is simply the value of certainty. Georgia’s new bifurcated-trial rule makes that calculation even more central.
What does it cost to talk to a lawyer about a possible case?
At most firms that handle wrongful death, including ours, the initial conversation is free and these cases are taken on a contingency basis, which means you do not pay attorney’s fees unless there is a recovery. There is no financial risk in simply finding out where you stand.