What Actually Happened: The Truth About Michael Jackson’s Death

“Medic 33, what is your emergency?”

“Yes, sir. I need to—I need an ambulance as soon as possible, sir. Sir, I have—we have a gentleman here that needs help and he’s not breathing.”

“You’re talking about Michael Jackson here. It was absolutely huge. There was a lot of pressure to get it right. This isn’t a man who should have died.”

“He’s not breathing. He—he’s not breathing, and we need to—we’re trying to pump him, but he’s not… he’s not…”

“Okay, okay. How old is he?”

“He’s 50 years old, sir. 50.”

“Okay. He’s unconscious. He’s not breathing?”

“Yes, he’s not breathing.”

“When we were dispatched to a 50-year-old male cardiac arrest, we think this is a viable patient—this is someone if we get to in a timely manner we can save—and then when I enter this room, opulent room with medical equipment in it, I realize there’s something unusual here. What 50-year-old male would be laying in bed at noon with medical equipment? We’re not looking at the patient at that moment until my partner did; he looked up and whispered the name, ‘Michael Jackson.’ When I realized who it was, I was surprised. We had no idea he was there. None of us had any idea who was living in our neighborhood.”

“Did anybody witness what happened?”

“No, just the doctor, sir. There was a man with our patient who identified himself as the doctor, and as such, I immediately asked him some information: what had happened? How long has this been going on? And he told me then that it had just happened. This was a patient to me that it seemed that he had not just passed away, that some time had gone by before we were notified, and in fact, later when you’re reflecting on this call—the days, the weeks, the months afterwards—one of the greatest regrets that all of us had was that we had not been called sooner.”

“When we came outside, that’s when we became aware of a very large presence. We were trying to back out on the street only to be hindered by many, many cameramen putting their lenses against the glass windows of the moving ambulance.”

“People seem to forget or don’t realize about this investigation: it was a death investigation. It really wasn’t a crime… um, at the time. From the information that I had, it was probably an accident or natural, and we would find out that he had some pre-existing medical condition, and then we would be done. Just look at what we knew in the first hours of this: taken to the hospital, there wasn’t a bloody knife, there wasn’t a smoking gun. There was nothing on the surface that would lead anyone to believe anything nefarious had occurred.”

“When I arrived at the hospital, Dr. Murray was gone, so he was no longer there at the scene. We’re in a bit of a panic then… uh, the one person that was in a room with him at the time that everything happened is no longer at the hospital. There were several attempts right away to get a hold of Dr. Murray… uh, that were negative. They were going to voicemail. You have family members, Jackson family members, coming in and people wanting some questions answered, as well as us.”

“It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home. A team of doctors, including emergency physicians and cardiologists, attempted to resuscitate him.”

“The emergency room physician, they believed it was a heart attack, partly because of what Mr. Murray had told them. Never told them anything about any other narcotics or anything. They just believed he had had a heart attack and stopped breathing.”

“So here we are at the Carolwood house. That day, by the time I got here, we had to block off this side of the street—the entrance side of the street—and it was full of media vans. We had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anything like it.”

“There was the room where Dr. Murray treated Mr. Jackson, and then there was a locked room, which was… uh, Mr. Jackson’s bedroom. There’s a fireplace in the room, and it was roaring, so the room was very, very hot. There were like Post-it notes or pieces of paper taped… uh, all over the room, on mirrors, on doors, with little slogans or phrases. I don’t know if they were lyrics or thoughts or… or some of them seemed like poems. The bedroom was… it was a mess.”

“In the room where he was being treated, it did not seem like a room fit for any type of medical treatment, not even like a home makeshift medical suite; it was just bare bones. I just remember going in there and there’s an IV stand, uh, saline bag, and just various medications strewn about.”

“There was a computer on the bed. There was a lifelike… uh, doll on the bed, and it was kind of like advertisements of… uh, pictures with babies. Everybody knew about the allegations that had been leveled against Mr. Jackson over the years. One of the things when I saw the laptop on the bed, do I go into it? But you have to realize the type of case I was investigating. Uh, when you get, you know, hold of an investigation, you have to kind of whittle out what is and what isn’t. It’s like with any case… um, you don’t allow whatever the victim was into prior to his death. Your investigation is focused on how did he die and who was responsible for it.”

“In the room where he was being treated, a bottle of Propofol had fallen on the ground and rolled under this moving nightstand. I didn’t know what it did. That ended up being a huge deal later. I had no medical background whatsoever; my neighbor was a doctor, so I went to my neighbor and I asked him about it, and my neighbor was the one who got it started of, ‘Whoa, what is this doing here? This is only used in surgeries. This is used to put people under.'”

“We had put it out in the press that we were looking for Dr. Murray. We still didn’t think that there was anything criminal going on. The only thing that we knew was this surgery drug was at the location and shouldn’t have been there. The next day, get a call: his attorney has been in contact, he consents to an interview. So our plan was to let him talk, and… uh, that’s what we did.”

“So, um, how long have you been Dr. to Jackson?”

“I first… um, started attending to him in 2006, and it was continuous 2006 on… no, well, no, or on and off and on—intermittent.”

“We didn’t know what happened; we didn’t want to assume anything, and we wanted to give the doctor an opportunity to dig his own hole if that was the case.”

“It’s just you and Michael?”

“Really, that’s how it is.”

“Okay, and this night, it was you just—you and Michael?”

“Just myself, and… and…”

“And he proceeded to tell us that, you know, Michael just couldn’t sleep. He was just so amped up about this upcoming concert. He by nature had a hard time sleeping. He gave him some drugs—some Valium, lorazepam, and diazepam, and a few others—to try and calm Michael, to try and get him to rest, to fall asleep. And… uh, nothing works. He was wide awake.”

“I said, ‘Do you feel a little bit drowsy? Do you think your eyes are telling you you want to sleep?’ He said, ‘No.'”

“Dr. Murray says, ‘You know, after trying all these various things, nothing was working.’ And it’s in the early morning hours of the next day, and… uh, so finally, I just gave Michael his milk.”

“And at that time, he said, ‘Um, I’d like to have some milk.'”

“Milk?”

“Hot, cold milk? What are we talking about?”

“He says, ‘Oh, well that’s… it’s a medication.'”

“Does the medication have…”

“In handcuffs. His attorneys didn’t want Dr. Murray to be seen in handcuffs in public, ’cause that’s not good for his image. And neither is killing somebody, but… behind our backs, the DA’s office made that agreement with Dr. Murray’s attorneys.”

“The doctor turned himself in voluntarily surrendered. You know, I’m of the opinion that regardless of who you are, what walk of life you come from… uh, if you’ve done wrong, then you need to answer for that.”

“I am an innocent man. I, therefore, plead not guilty.”

“Again, he feels he done nothing wrong. It wasn’t his fault. He’s… he’s… he’s an arrogant individual.”

“Conrad Murray figuratively and literally abandoned Michael Jackson. We looked at Murray’s phone records. That was a big, huge piece. We could see Murray on his phone at certain times; he left this vulnerable man filled with Valium and midazolam and lorazepam and Propofol with no medical monitoring equipment, no necessary resuscitative equipment. He left him there—abandoned him to fend for himself. So as far as stepping away for a minute and going to the bathroom and coming back, and, ‘Oh my gosh, Michael’s dead,’ no. He was sending emails, reviewing a contract, and he was also on the telephone with various people. While he was on the phone, he realized that Mr. Jackson was not breathing.”

“I heard… um, mumbling of voices. It sounded like the phone was maybe in his pocket or something. It was, and I heard coughing.”

“We looked at the timelines of when the 911 call was, I think around 20 to 25 minutes after that call with Sadi ending. Mr. Murray started cleaning up the mess that he had left, covering up the medical treatment that he was giving. Put that away, called for help from security, directed them to call 911 while he gave ineffective one-handed CPR, and then traveled to the hospital with Mr. Jackson.”

“Dr. Murray fled the hospital before we arrived, waited a couple days to get his story straight, and ultimately was… uh, prosecuted for his conduct.”

“We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Conrad Robert Murray, guilty of the crime of involuntary manslaughter.”

“That’s how that turned out.”

“Should have been a second-degree murder. Yeah, I think it could have been. Unfortunately, that is not a choice that we were able to make.”

“The biggest thing is that he does not get his medical license back in any state, and I… I personally don’t see that happening. And I’m just trying to keep it light and polite here, uh, but yeah, he’s… he’s in his own world. He’s in his own world, Dr. Murray.”

“I think that this case, we actually have the answers. We won’t be in that book of unsolved murders, all the big ones where we failed. At least my name won’t be… uh, put… put in the same place as those.”

“It’s something I’ll never forget, obviously, the rest of my life. Uh, one hell of an experience. Yeah, no regrets.”

“In big cases like this… um, sometimes, you know, friendships can really dissolve, but not in this case. It was… uh, we all lived happily ever after.”

“As soon as this one was over, it comes to… this is what we expect of you. You get your next murder and you move forward.”

“About four years after the trial, I was driving home… uh, from work. I look over to my left and I see this green, older, nice Mercedes. I feel someone staring at me. I look over in the same car and I see Dr. Murray. It took me a few seconds to register that it was him, and by that time our cars had separated. But I never saw any double takes or any instant moment of recognition. At that time, I was… I wondered whether or not he would start practicing medicine again. Do you give someone like that a second chance? Someone who’s done their time for the crime that they’ve committed? When do you let it go?”