Michael Jackson death was homocide says LA coroner
The Los Angeles coroner has described Michael Jackson's death as homicide and confirmed he had lethal levels of the powerful anesthetic propofol in his body. After weeks of leaks and speculation, the conclusion of the Los Angeles chief medical examiner was announced on Monday by law enforcement officials.
Jackson's doctor, Conrad Murray, has already admitted administering the drug propofol to the "King of Pop".
Details of his treatment were revealed separately on Monday in documents unsealed by a court in Houston, Texas, where Dr Murray practises.
Court documents showed that Jackson consumed a cocktail of drugs in the hours before he died, the Los Angeles Times reported. According to a newly unsealed affidavit accompanying a search warrant used in the investigation of Jackson's death, Dr Murray told detectives he gave the "King of Pop" propofol to treat insomnia.
Jackson suffered cardiac arrest and died on June 25 aged 50. Since then, police have investigated his death with a focus on prescription drugs and the role of doctors who treated him, including Dr Murray.
An autopsy report in to Jackons' death remains sealed while police complete their investigation into the role prescription drugs may have played in his death and the actions of his doctors.
According to court records, Dr Murray told detectives he had been giving Jackson 50 mg of propofol every night for six weeks using an intravenous drip.
Dr Murray told detectives he feared Jackson was forming an addiction and began trying to wean the pop star off the drugs. He lowered the dosage to 25 mg and mixed it with two other sedatives, lorazepam and midazolam. On June 23, two days before Jackson's death, he administered those two medications and withheld the propofol.
On the morning Jackson died, Dr Murray said, he tried to induce sleep without using propofol, according to the affidavit. He said he gave Jackson valium at 1.30 a.m. When that did not work, he said, he injected lorazepam intravenously at 2 am.
At 3 am, when Jackson was still awake, Murray administered yet another drug, midazolam.
Over the next few hours, Murray said he gave Jackson various drugs. Then at 10:40 am Murray administered 25 mg of propofol after Jackson repeatedly demanded the drug, according to the court records, the Los Angeles Times reported.
At least two doctors gave Jackson propofol in Germany. Dr Murray said Jackson had declined to tell him about what treatment he had received from other doctors.
He said he had seen injection marks on Jackson's feet and hands. When he asked Jackson about them, the pop star told him he had been given a "cocktail" to help him. In addition to Dr Murray, authorities subpoenaed medical records from several other American doctors.
Dr Murray has already acknowledged obtaining and administering propofol to Jackson the morning that he died. Dr Murray told police he left Jackson alone under the influence of the medication to make telephone calls to his office and family.
He returned to find Jackson was not breathing and performed CPR.
Jackson was declared dead in hospital.
UPDATE: AUG 2009 King of Pop’ lives on another planet. Michael Jackson’s outlandish life is being overshadowed in his death by events so preposterous they seem to come from a fiction writer’s overactive imagination.
They include a petition to award him a Nobel peace prize; a growing list of people who claim to be the real parents of Jackson’s children; a lawsuit from an alleged ex-wife; and a sect that believes the ‘King of Pop’ lives on, albeit on another planet.
Jackson died in Los Angeles on June 25 at age 50 from an apparent cardiac arrest. His son Prince Michael, 12; his daughter Paris, 11, and seven-year-old son Prince Michael II — known as ‘Blanket’ — are the immediate heirs to the late singer’s music empire. Their legal guardian is Katherine Jackson, the children’s paternal grandmother.
According to a case filed recently in Los Angeles, a woman named Claire Elisabeth Fields Cruise claims to be the children’s sole biological mother.
Documents filed by Fields Cruise, and posted on celebrity website TMZ.com, also claim Prince Michael I was fathered by a man who lives in France, while Paris Jackson’s father was Fields Cruise’s ‘unofficial college sweetheart.’
Fields Cruise told a judge she gave birth to the children without being pregnant with them.
‘There is technology that is in existence,’ she told reporters after she filed the case,’to remove the conceived children from her body and insert them into the bodies of the surrogates who gave birth to them.’
Fields Cruise also claimed that Jackson ‘always knew’ he was the biological father of Connor Cruise, the 14 year-old black child that actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman adopted in 1995, when they were still married.
One day before Fields Cruise filed her case, British ex-child star Mark Lester said that he might be Paris Jackson’s father.
‘I gave Michael my sperm so that he could have kids — and I believe Paris is my daughter,’ Lester, who played Oliver Twist in the 1968 film musical ‘Oliver!,’ told the British tabloid News of the World.
Jackson family spokespeople said the 51-year-old Briton was a friend of Jackson and is godfather to all three of his children, but denied Lester’s parenthood claim.
Jackson had his first two children, Prince Michael and Paris, when he was married to Debbie Rowe, an assistant to his dermatologist, between 1996 and 1999.
Rowe signed over parental rights to the children to Jackson, who later had a third child, Prince Michael II, by a surrogate.
Rowe’s boss Arnold Klein even weighed in with a cryptic statement on paternity. ‘To the best of my knowledge, I am not the father of these children,’ Klein told ABC News in early July.
Rowe and Jackson may have divorced, but one Nona Paris Lola Ankhesenamun Jackson claims to be the singer’s legitimate wife — and filed a case in Los Angeles court five days after the singer’s death asking ‘that all my husband’s properties, monies and assets must be transferred to me immediately.’
While there is no evidence linking the woman to Jackson, she also claims Jackson’s children are hers and that she did not authorize them to live with their grandmother.
Separately, a woman by the name of Billie Jean Jackson — like Jackson’s famous hit song ‘Bille Jean’ — showed up in court claiming an unspecified link to ‘Blanket’ Jackson.
Jean asked the judge to hire a handwriting expert to check Jackson’s will for forgeries; asked for the right to visit Blanket every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 2 pm; and asked to not to be ‘arrested’ by Katherine Jackson or estate executor John Branca.
Meanwhile, gossip magazines allege that 25-year-old rapper Omer Bhatti is Jackson’s love child, conceived in a one-night stand with a Norwegian fan.
Bhatti lived at Neverland ranch for eight years and was with the Jackson family at the singer’s funeral. Friends told reporters however that he was a merely Jackson protege, and Bhatti has denied any biological link to the singer.
That hasn’t stopped the late singer’s estranged father Joe Jackson from claiming that Bhatti was Michael’s son.
‘Yes, I knew he had another son, yes I did,’ Joe Jackson told ABC News in a July 31 interview. Bhatti ‘looks like a Jackson, he can dance like a Jackson,’ he added, offering no further proof.
Soon after Jackson’s death, a website opened nominating the singer for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for having ‘given of himself completely and selflessly in a lifelong effort to help better global conditions for children, and all of humankind.’
As of Saturday more than 31,000 people had signed the petition — even though Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.
Some people say they see Jackson’s ghost in a CNN documentary filmed at the late star’s Neverland estate soon after his death.
Others may be consoled by the Raelian Movement, a group that says Jackson — named a Raelian Honorary Guide in 1992 — probably lives on.
‘Considering all the good things Michael did on Earth for peace and love, I’m sure he is alive today on the Elohim’s Eternal-Life Planet,’ group leader Rael said in a July 7 statement.
Raelians believe that all life on Earth was created by human scientists from another planet known as the Elohim, who ancient humans mistook for gods.
Jackson ‘is among the few humans from Earth to be so cloned, and will return to Earth with the Elohim’ when humans will welcome them back, the statement read.
UPDATE: 27 July 2009
MJ’s hair to be turned into diamonds
Since Michael Jackson’s sudden death on June 25, the rumor mill over details of his bizarre personal life has ground away nearly non-stop, and on Friday, one company said it was turning his hair into diamonds. That one is true.
The claims this week included a report in Rolling Stone magazine that a prosthetic nose he wore apparently went missing when he was taken to the morgue, and a British tabloid trumpeted a headline that he fathered a secret love-child.
In one by-product of the “Thriller” singer’s death, a Chicago company said on Friday it had obtained some of the hair Jackson burned while filming a 1984 Pepsi commercial and planned to create a limited edition of diamonds from it.
“Absolutely this is for real,” said Dean Vanden-Biesen, founder of LifeGem, which has a patent on a process that extracts carbon from hair, turns it into crystals and then into high-quality laboratory diamonds.
VandenBiesen told Reuters he thought the company could make about 10 diamonds. No sale price has been set but VandenBiesen said LifeGem created three diamonds from locks of Beethoven’s hair in 2007, and sold one of them for around $200,000.
Separately, the August 6 issue of Rolling Stone magazine reported that not only was the left arm of Jackson’s dead body “scored with needle marks” - claims that have arisen before - but he wore an artificial nose that was missing when he was taken to the Los Angeles county morgue.
“The prosthesis that he normally attached to his damaged nose was missing, revealing bits of cartilage surrounding a small dark hole,” the magazine said in an unsourced report.
MORE UPDATE
It had been believed that Michael Jackson — who passed away June 25 — had only three children; 12-year-old Prince Michael, Paris Michael Katherine, 11, and 7-year-old "Blanket."
But that's all changing now.
This combo photo shows Bhatti (L) and Michael Jackson. Bhatti, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jackson's young son Blanket, lived at the singer's Neverland Ranch for several years in the late '90s and sat on the front row of the singer's memorial along with The Jackson Family. Bhatti, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jackson's young son Blanket, lived at the singer's Neverland Ranch for several years in the late '90s and sat on the front row of the singer's memorial along with The Jackson Family.
Omer Bhatti first met Michael in Tunisia in 1996. The then-12-year-old impressed the pop legend with his dance moves. Omer has since performed with the singer and worked as a Michael tribute act across the globe. The dancer's stepfather Riz once worked as a driver for MJ while his mother is thought to have been a nanny.
UPDATE: 3 July 2009 New photos have emerged of Michael Jackson's final rehearsals for his big comeback just two days before his death. The pictures were released by AEG, the promoters of his 'This Is It' tour which was to have taken in 50 dates at the O2 Arena in London. In the images, the name of the tour is spelt out in huge letters at the back of the stage.
According to AEG the photos were taken on June 23 at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles - two days before Jacko died from a suspected cardiac arrest.
Michael Jackson looks thin and tired from his strenuous work out routine.
After not performing for years, the star intended to take to the stage for the mega concerts in London. In one of the pictures his face looks like a mask.
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