Just two days ago, a report was issued by the NTSB, the National Safety and Transportation Board in reference to the plane crash that took the life of Roy Halladay back on November 7, 2017.
Embed from Getty ImagesThe progress of investigating the accident is taking it’s course and now 2 1/2 years later, there are more facts coming out about the whole situation. Those facts aren’t pretty, in fact, they are very revealing about the deep issues that Roy Halladay went through after he retired from baseball in 2013.
Here’s the official report from the NTSB with factual evidence about the crash:
Halladay’s widow, Brandi Halladay issued her own statement, and the Phillies organization, in turn, sent it out saying that “Nobody’s perfect…” And we’ve heard this a number of times from Brandi in ceremonies honoring her husband who was a great baseball pitcher. It’s understandable what she is saying, it brings back memories and it’s a shame. NJ.com did a story on Brandi’s pain she is reliving.
A local Philadelphia radio station talking sports sent out a tweet on 4/16/2020, it was 97.5 The Fanatic. What they wanted to know was simply, does any of this change your opinion about Roy Halladay. It wasn’t only that station, many news outlets were asking the same thing, the New York Post even ran a story along the same lines. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a piece by Mike Sielski, did a great story on Halladay back in 2019.
Embed from Getty ImagesThe radio station retracted and deleted the tweet by the evening on 4/16, many people wrote in support of Halladay who did very well in Philadelphia and he pitched a Perfect Game and a No-hitter while here.
Halladay while being a great baseball player, and a person that people looked up to suddenly looked as if that persona was tarnished, and indeed it was, upon learning that Roy Halladay piloted the plane that he eventually crashed and killed himself in, under the Skyway Bridge that connects Sarasota and Tampa. Plus the fact that he flew dangerously close to houses on the day he did crash his airplane. He put other lives in danger on his path of what now sounds more like suicidal actions.
Yes, drugs played a big part in all of this, as evidenced by the report that was released. Compounded with the fact that Halladay was in rehab twice for substance abuse following his retirement from baseball. These were known facts, how was Halladay able to secure a pilots license given these facts? Again, it could fall under the explanation of ‘nobody’s perfect.”
The people around Roy Halladay had to know there was a serious issue, when combinations of drugs are involved bad things come of it. Could have some further intervention kept Roy Halladay from hurting himself or possibly others?

When you read things like fatal crash NTSB reports, you get a feel for what happened leading up to the ‘accident.’ The same type of report that was issued when pitcher Jose Fernandez from the Miami Marlins crashed his boat with two others aboard into a jetty killing all three. Again, ‘nobody’s perfect’ but if you ignore looking at the cause and effect of the actions of someone involved in a situation like this, that isn’t right either.
There will be more coming from the NTSB on the crash, this isn’t the final report, and we’ve even known about some of the info included in the report, but if anything it sheds some light on a person who definitely should not have been flying a high-performance aircraft around knowing that he was impaired at the time of the fatal crash.