LA police hunt for Michael Jackson's doctor

Police are investigating claims that Michael Jackson received a painkilling injection minutes before his death

• A recording of the dramatic telephone call reporting Michael Jackson’s collapse to emergency services, in which the caller said that the singer was unconscious and failing to respond to a doctor’s attempts to revive him, was released yesterday.
  As Jackson’s friends and family were reported yesterday to have been concerned about the singer’s use of painkillers, the recording from an unnamed caller was posted on the internet.
• The call starts with an unidentified man telling the operator: “We have a gentleman here that needs help and he’s not breathing, We are trying to pump him but he’s not breathing.” When asked to describe the patient the caller replies: “He’s 50 years old. He’s not breathing. He’s not conscious. He’s on the bed.”
• The caller, who does not name Jackson, adds: “We have a personal doctor here with him, Sir, but he is not responding to anything. He is not responding to CPR or anything.”
  When the operator asks if anybody witnessed what happened, the caller replies: “Just the doctor. The doctor has been the only one here.” He is then heard saying: “Doctor, did you see what’s happening?”
• There is a muffled response before the caller tells the operator: “He is pumping, pumping his chest, but he is not responding to anything. Please.”
• Brian Oxman, Jackson’s former attorney, said that he had warned the singer’s relatives about possible abuse. “I said one day, we’re going to have this experience. And when Anna Nicole Smith passed away, I said we cannot have this kind of thing with Michael Jackson,” Mr Oxman told the Today show on NBC. “I warned everyone, and lo and behold, here we are. I don’t know what caused his death. But I feared this day, and here we are.”
  Mr Oxman and other family friends said that Jackson had prescription drugs at his disposal to help with pain suffered when he broke his leg after he fell off a stage and for broken vertebrae.
• The singer’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, said that Jackson was afraid that he would die like her father, Elvis. “Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general,” she wrote on her internet blog. “I can’t recall the exact subject matter but he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my father’s death. He stared at me intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did’.”
• Presley, 41, who was married to Jackson between 1994 and 1996, added: “I promptly tried to deter him from the idea, at which point he just shrugged his shoulders and nodded, almost matter of fact, as if to let me know he knew what he knew and that was kind of that.”
• She said that watching the television of an ambulance leaving the driveway surrounded by crowds brought back memories of the conversation. “Fourteen years later I am sitting here watching on the news an ambulance leaving the driveway of his home, the big gates, the crowds outside the gates, the coverage, the crowds outside the hospital, the cause of death and what may have led up to it and the memory of this conversation hit me, as did the unstoppable tears.
• “A predicted ending by him, by loved ones and by me, but what I didn’t predict was how much it was going to hurt when it happened,” she added.
  TMZ, the celebrity gossip website that broke the news of Jackson’s death, reported that his father, Joe, wanted to put his son into a rehab facility in California for an addiction to morphine and prescription drugs.
• Liza Minnelli told The Early Show on CBS by telephone: “When the autopsy comes, all hell’s going to break loose, so thank God we’re celebrating him now.”
  Uri Geller, who was a friend of Jackson, said: “I saw Michael do things that I don’t like and I screamed and shouted at him. But most of the people around him never warned him and did not tell him to stop.”
• In 2007 Jackson settled a lawsuit filed by a Beverly Hills pharmacy that claimed he owed more than $100,000 for prescription drugs over a two-year period. After Jackson was acquitted on child molestation charges in 2005, the Santa Barbara County District Attorney Tom Sneddon argued against returning to Jackson some items belonging he described as “contraband”. Mr Sneddon said that those included syringes, the drug Demerol and prescriptions for various drugs, mainly antibiotics, in different people’s names.
• Tarak Ben Ammar, a former producer and friend, echoed fears of drug abuse, claiming that Jackson had been a hypochondriac who had been taken advantage of by “charlatan doctors”.
  “It’s clear that the criminals in this affair are the doctors who treated him throughout his career, who destroyed his face, who gave him medicine to ease his pain,” he told Europe 1 radio in France.
• However, Jackson’s manager, who tried to resuscitate him at the house, denounced reports that he had taken drugs as “baloney”. Tohme Tohme, a former doctor who acted as his business manager, said: “Michael Jackson never did any drugs as far as I know. He was healthy. For him to perform he needed insurance. AEG [the promoters of the London shows] brought in an independent doctor and gave him a four-hour physical. He came out like a rose.”
• Mr Tohme confirmed that he was at the house when Jackson was suffering cardiac arrest. But he said: “I came in when he was gone.”
  It is thought that his body will be released to his family after the post-mortem examination. No funeral plans have been announced yet.

By www.MICHAELJACKSON50.com