Jackson was healthy before death

Chamari Senanayake

Michael Jackson’s personal doctor is accused of being responsible for his death and is facing a charge of involuntary manslaughter. A preliminary hearing to decide if he should face a full trial began in Los Angeles last week and completed on Monday, stirring a worldwide interest as prosecutors outlined the case against him.

Los Angeles County Prosecutor David Walgren began to lay out the case against Dr Conrad Murray last Tuesday, saying that Jackson was dead even before paramedics got to his home and Dr Murray tried to conceal the fact he had administered Propofol to Jackson.

Michael Jackson

Walgren said the evidence will show Dr Murray ordered a bodyguard to help him clean up evidence and waited at least 20 minutes before he called 911 for help. He went on to say that once Jackson was taken to the hospital, Dr Murray still had not told anyone about the use of Propofol, saying, “Not a word was said about Propofol to the UCLA doctors.”

On this Monday, in a twist to Dr Murray’s denial of giving a lethal dose of propofol before, he now claims he was feeling “pressure” from MJ to give him something to help him sleep, and Jackson was begging for propofol.

MJ may have drank himself to death by consuming a juice box laced with propofol, at least that’s what Dr Murray’s defense team suggested in court. They seem to be suggesting that MJ was secretly self-administering his propofol, which would support Murray’s defense theory that MJ accidentally caused his own overdose. But a pharmacist Dr Murray used to order propofol just testified the doctor ordered box after box of the drug in the two months before Michael Jackson’s death.

Also on this Monday, a girlfriend of Dr Conrad Murray’s at the time of Jackson’s death just established for prosecutors Murray waited around 25 minutes after noticing MJ was lifeless before calling 911. In another damming evidence, two reps from the phone company testified in the hours surrounding the revelation that Jackson was lifeless in bed, Murray was texting and calling lots of people, but never called 911 for help.

An Emergency worker called Richard Seneff who arrived at Michael Jackson’s house four minutes after the 911 call said on Monday that Michael was dead when he arrived, and it looked like he had been dead for a long time before Dr Conrad Murray called 911.

Kai Chase, MJ’s cook had testified MJ was on an extremely healthy diet, dining on seared tuna salad for lunch the day before he died. Previously, DA also pointed out Murray performed CPR incorrectly, with one hand on his bed, rather than a hard surface.

To support this argument Faheem Muhammad, one of Michael Jackson’s bodyguards, testified that Dr Murray was on his knees doing compressions on MJ in a panicked state, when he turned to Faheem and another bodyguard and asked, “Does anyone in the room know CPR?”. This comes as shocking evidence as any medical professional should know a basic thing as CPR to save a life in an emergency.

Faheem recalled how Jackson’s two older children Prince and Paris were near the room and Paris was on her hands and knees crying. Faheem also revealed that after Michael was pronounced dead at UCLA medical centre, Dr Murray told him he was hungry and left.

District attorney David Walgren told the court: “There are a number of actions displayed by Dr Murray that show an extreme deviation from the standard of care.”

Mr Walgren said Murray, who was paid very highly to treat the king of pop, had failed to tell paramedics or hospital doctors that he had given Jackson an intravenous drip containing propofol, a powerful surgical anesthetic.

This so called doctor’s questionable behaviour and mysteries surrounding King of Pop’s death continues to baffle Jackson fans and draw a world-wide interest, just as when he was alive.

Another witness, Jackson’s personal assistant Michael Amir Williams, described the heartbreaking moment when the Jackson’s children were told that their father was dead.