When ABC News producer Dax Tejera died suddenly on Dec. 23, it was announced that he’d died from a heart attack.
However, the NYC Medical Examiner’s Office determined he died from choking on his food while he was intoxicated.
The autopsy report concluded that Tejera, 37, died from “asphyxia due to obstruction of airway by food bolus complicating acute alcohol intoxication.”
Tejera and his wife Veronica Tejera, 33, joined another couple for dinner at a steakhouse around the corner from their upscale hotel in NYC on Dec. 23.
A source at the restaurant said the couple “weren’t there long” before Tejera began to show signs of distress around 10 p.m.
“So, before anyone ate, just after the server brought the orders, he asked, ‘Are you ok sir?'” the staffer told The NY Post.
Tejera “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,” he said.
“The server said that Tejera collapsed in the corner, right here outside the restaurant,” the staffer said.
ABC News President Kim Godwin initially reported that Tejera had died from a heart attack. In an internal memo to staff on Dec. 24, Godwin said Tejera died “suddenly of a heart attack.”
Last month, Veronica Tejera was arrested for leaving the couple’s 2 daughters “unattended” in their hotel room on the evening of his death. Veronica accompanied her stricken husband in the ambulance to the hospital. She sent a friend to the hotel to collect her infant and toddler. But the hotel staff refused to let the friend into the room.
Veronica told Entertainment Tonight and the New York Post in a statement on Jan. 2 that she made a “poor decision” to leave her children alone.
“When Dax collapsed on December 23rd, I accompanied him in an ambulance to the hospital. I asked both a close friend and my parents to rush to my children’s hotel room to attend to them as I monitored them by camera,” she said. “The hotel would not allow my friend in and instead called the NYPD.”
Veronica Tejera added, “We had two cameras trained on my children as they slept, and I monitored them closely in the time I was away from them. While the girls were unharmed, I realize that it was a poor decision.”
She was charged with two counts of “acting in a manner injurious to a child.”
