Officials revealed on Wednesday that an ABC News producer who died after leaving his children behind at a hotel while he and his wife went to a restaurant in Midtown New York choked to death because he was drunk.
Dax Tejera’s official cause of death was confirmed to be “asphyxia due to obstruction of airway by food bolus complicating acute alcohol intoxication” by the New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
Tejera was the executive producer of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and unexpectedly died on Dec. 23 at 37.
ABC News president Kim Goodwin originally claimed that Tejera had died of a heart attack.
Tejera’s wife Veronica was arrested just hours after he collapsed for leaving the couple’s young kids alone in a hotel room in the Yale Club that evening. She was charged with child endangerment but insisted she was monitoring her children.
The mother said that she brought her husband to the hospital, asking her parents and a close friend to watch their five-month-old and two-year-old while she monitored them by camera.
“The hotel would not allow my friend in and instead called the NYPD,” she said in a statement after her arrest.
However, sources claimed that the couple had left their children at home to go to dinner with friends at Bobby Van’s 230Park. An employee there said that Dax seemed unwell shortly into the meal, prompting a server to check on him.
“So, before anyone ate, just after the server brought the orders, he asked, ‘Are you OK, sir?’” the staffer told the Post.
Tejera then “got up and started walking like he was going to the men’s room, but he made a right instead and went out the front door and the server followed him outside.”
“The server said that he collapsed in the corner, right here outside the restaurant,” the employee said. “It was terrible and a terrible shame they left little, little children alone like that.”
Tejera joined ABC News in 2017 as a senior producer, moving to Stephanopoulos’ show in February 2020. He had previously worked at NBC News and graduated from Dartmouth College with a history degree and the Columbia University School of Journalism.
