Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (39 page)

19

On June 25, 2009, at 12:26 p.m., paramedics burst into Michael Jackson’s bedroom at 100 North Carolwood Drive, responding to a 911 call placed just minutes before. They found Jackson unconscious and not breathing. After numerous attempts at resuscitation failed, at 1:07 they put him in an ambulance and rushed him to the UCLA Medical Center, just three miles away. A little over an hour later, at 2:26 p.m., Michael Joseph Jackson was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest. A full autopsy was ordered to determine the exact cause.

Three hours later, Michael’s brother Jermaine emerged from the hospital and issued a statement confirming what the world had already known for some time. The tabloid website
TMZ
broke the news of Jackson’s death just minutes after the coroner’s pronouncement was made, triggering an unprecedented surge of media coverage. In the hours after Jackson’s death, Internet traffic spiked by 15 percent worldwide, crashing Wikipedia, Twitter, and the website of the
Los Angeles Times
. The rate of status updates on Facebook tripled.

As the wider world Googled and tweeted and streamed the news of Jackson’s death, a crowd of fans and onlookers started to gather outside UCLA Medical Center to stand vigil. Other gatherings sprang up outside the Carolwood mansion and at the gates of Neverland. By the evening, huge crowds had assembled outside the original Motown headquarters in Detroit and the Apollo Theater in
Harlem. By the next morning, spontaneous gatherings had spread to the streets of London, Paris, Mexico City, Nairobi, and Moscow.

A televised public memorial was held for Jackson on July 7 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Jackson’s brothers, each wearing a single white glove, acted as pallbearers, bringing the singer’s casket out onto the stage. Eulogies were given by a range of luminaries, from Brooke Shields to the Reverend Al Sharpton to Motown’s Berry Gordy. In between the speeches, musical performances of Jackson’s greatest hits were performed by Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, and Jennifer Hudson. Over 31 million viewers watched the broadcast in the United States. More than 6.5 million watched in England, 18 million in Brazil, and millions more in other countries. In addition to the television audience, 33 million streamed the video online, making Michael Jackson’s farewell the most-watched memorial of a public figure in world history.

The global outpouring that followed Jackson’s passing demonstrated just how popular the singer remained. In just the week that he died, Jackson sold 2.6 million digital downloads and over 800,000 albums. In the last six months of 2009, he sold 9 million albums in the United States and 35 million albums worldwide.
Michael Jackson’s This Is It
, a documentary film compiled from the concert’s rehearsal footage, was later released for a two-week limited theatrical run. It earned over $261 million, making it the highest-grossing music film of all time.
Billboard
magazine estimated that in the year after Jackson’s passing, his fans generated over $1 billion in revenue for the parties that inherited control of his interests.

On September 3, 2009, Michael Jackson was interred in a private ceremony at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. In the weeks that had passed since his death, the events surrounding it had started to become clear. The most jarring news had come on August 27, when the Los Angeles coroner’s office ruled Jackson’s death a homicide, citing its cause as “acute propofol intoxication with benzodiazepine effect.”

Propofol, a powerful anesthetic, was a drug that most people had never heard of, as it is used only in hospital settings to render patients unconscious for major surgery; if used without the proper instruments to measure oxygen levels, heart rate, and blood pressure, it can be extremely dangerous. Under the intense physical and emotional stress of putting the London shows together, Jackson’s insomnia had become crippling. Desperate for sleep, he’d increasingly turned to his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, to help him by administering nightly doses of the drug.

On the evening of June 24, Jackson had arrived at the Staples Center for full-dress rehearsals. After weeks of seeming weak and fatigued, the singer appeared full of renewed energy and ran through the entire program, giving a show-stopping performance that director Kenny Ortega described as “bioluminescent.” Jackson left the arena at twelve-thirty, returning home for yet another sleepless night. Trying to bring him down from the evening’s performance, Dr. Murray first administered heavy doses of the sedatives lorazepam and midazolam. But by the time the sun came up, Jackson still hadn’t slept, and at 10:40 a.m., Murray gave him a final push of twenty-five milligrams of propofol.

An hour later, by the doctor’s own account, he discovered that Jackson wasn’t breathing. After several panicked minutes trying to administer CPR on his own, Murray ran downstairs screaming for help. Jackson’s L.A. security team, joined by Prince and Paris Jackson, followed Murray back into Jackson’s bedroom and witnessed the doctor frantically trying to bring their father back to life. Nearly half an hour passed between the time Jackson was found not breathing and when 911 was called.

Eight months after Jackson’s death, in February 2010, Dr. Conrad Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter for administering the fatal dose of propofol. When the doctor’s trial finally got underway in the fall of 2011, Dr. Christopher Rogers, chief of forensic medicine for the Los Angeles County coroner, testified that while Michael
Jackson was underweight and fatigued from the rehearsals, his health was otherwise normal for a fifty-year-old man. But for the events that transpired on June 25, 2009, the singer could have conceivably lived well into old age. On November 7, 2011, Murray was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.

During the trial, Bill Whitfield, the head of Michael Jackson’s Las Vegas security, was called to testify in the hope that what he and his team had learned during their time on the job might offer a clearer picture, and a better understanding, of what happened on the day that Michael Jackson died.

Bill
: That morning, I was out running errands, still debating whether or not I should go to L.A. By the time I got home, I’d pretty much decided that I should. I should just get in my car and go. Find out what’s going on. But the second I walked into the house, my phone started blowing up.
Blowing. Up
. Emails. Text messages. Voice mails. I answered one call and it was a buddy of mine, and he said, “Yo, what’s up with your boy?!”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Your boy’s dead, man!”

“Who?!”

“Michael Jackson!”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

I didn’t believe him. I’d heard that before. Had to be a rumor. But my phone just kept ringing. I was seeing names of people I knew back in New York, people I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. I got scared. I got up and turned on the TV, and it was breaking news on every channel.

Javon
: I was at Best Buy doing some shopping, and all of a sudden, my phone started ringing like crazy. At the same moment that started, one of the sales girls in the CD section shouted out, “Oh, no!
Michael Jackson dead!” I reached for my phone to answer it and it was my cousin Jeff. He said, “Mr. Jackson’s gone.”

“Are you for real?!”

“That’s what they’re saying. Let me find out more and call you back.”

I took a pause. All I could think was, Where are the kids? Did they see their father when he died? Who has them right now? I rushed home so I could see the news for myself.

Bill
: On the TV, camera crews were camped outside the hospital. Now it was all real. The newscaster was saying, “We’re waiting for an announcement from one of the family members.” That’s when I saw Jermaine step up to the podium, and I was thinking, Is he really getting ready to say what I think he’s getting ready to say? Jermaine was pausing and taking deep breaths, and finally he said, “My brother, the legendary King of Pop, Michael Jackson, has passed away . . .” I just fell back on the couch in shock.

Javon
: Once I heard it confirmed by the coroner’s office, I went in the bathroom by myself and I just broke down and started crying. I was looking in the mirror, and my heart dropped and my chest was really hurting. I just kept thinking about the kids. Where are they? How are they taking it? They didn’t really know the rest of his family that well. He kept them away from everybody. The only other person they’d ever really known was Ms. Grace. With their daddy gone, who were they going to go to now? Who was going to take care of them?

Bill
: When they showed the footage of the ambulance leaving his house, my first thought was, They waited for an ambulance? Why didn’t they take him to the hospital? Why didn’t they just grab him and rush him to the hospital at the first sign of something wrong?

In the days after, all I could think was, What if I had been
there? Could I have done something? Would it have been different if I’d just gone to L.A. when he called? Later on, when I heard the actual 911 call, I heard them on the phone telling the operator, “We have a gentleman here. He’s not breathing.” Fuck that. I would have thrown him in the car and rushed him to the hospital myself. It was only a couple miles away. I would have got him out of there. He’s not breathing? Let’s go! We gotta go! Maybe it would have been different if I’d actually been there. Maybe I’m just imagining how I would have reacted, but I really don’t think I would have just sat around waiting for the paramedics.

That scenario kept running through my mind: What if? I kept playing it back and forth in my head. But I can tell you what did
not
cross my mind when I heard that he died. I didn’t even think about Dr. Conrad Murray. Didn’t imagine for a second that he might have been involved. Propofol? I’d never heard of it. He wasn’t using anything like that to sleep when he was around us, and we knew he wasn’t because he was never asleep.

All I ever really knew about Michael Jackson and prescription drugs was what everyone else knew, what you heard in the media. There aren’t too many negative things I haven’t heard about Michael Jackson, and it’s all just rumors, so I always tried to go by what I saw with my own eyes, and I didn’t see much. There was the time he wanted to go to the hospital in Virginia in the middle of the night. That was unusual. The camera he tore up at the Four Seasons? There was something going on there. But that was really it. In all that time of being in really close, personal contact with him, that was all I saw. The Michael Jackson I knew, most of the time he’d be reading a book or helping the kids with their homework. That was the guy I worked for.

Dr. Murray visited Mr. Jackson maybe three or four times in the months I was with him. And the few times he came, it was because the kids were sick. Paris had the flu, Blanket had an upset stomach, something like that. If Dr. Murray was treating Mr. Jackson,
bringing him prescriptions on the side, I wouldn’t know, of course. But he was never at the house more than an hour, hour and a half, tops. Never overnight. If Dr. Murray was helping him to sleep, he wasn’t doing it on my watch. And why not? Why wasn’t Dr. Murray in Virginia? Why wasn’t he in New Jersey? He wasn’t there because Michael Jackson didn’t need all that. The King of Pop brought that on, because he had all these vultures after him, trying to do all these shows, all that pressure. The King of Pop brings all the drama.

Javon:
For weeks after, I was kicking myself. I kept thinking, What if I’d been there? I can’t say for sure how I would have handled it, but if I’d been there when they pronounced him dead, I know I’d have blamed myself. I would have said, “Was there something I didn’t do right? Did I wait too long to call the ambulance?” Something. That would have destroyed me, having him die on my watch, his kids thinking that we didn’t do what it took to keep their daddy alive. Not being there, at least I had some closure.

Bill:
I started to feel that we weren’t supposed to be there. We were not supposed to be a part of that, the scenery of him passing away. Everybody that was part of that has to carry it for the rest of their lives. Someone actually said that to me, too. One of his fans said that to me. She said, “He was going to die in L.A. This show, this pressure, it was going to happen, and maybe your relationship went the way it went because he wasn’t supposed to die on your watch. You weren’t supposed to carry that burden on you.” I think about that still. “I wasn’t supposed to be there.” Was I not? Maybe that’s some crazy thinking, but I wonder about it. I hold onto that.

Looking back on it now, in some ways I’m more relieved than sad. I’ve accepted it. Part of me honestly believes that he didn’t die. He left. I’m leaving this place. I’m leaving this shit, this life. I’m out. Because it was never going to be right for him. Never. Not in this world. He was never going to have the life that you and I have,
to just get up and go, be free. Michael Jackson was going to have vultures swarming him; he was going to need security following him, watching his every move, for the rest of his life. Who wants to live like that? There was no peace for him here. That’s what I say to myself. Now, he’ll rest.

That’s how I started to feel in the months after it happened, but it took me a while to get there. Right after he died, there was about a week before the memorial at the Staples Center. I was in touch with a woman from AEG, because they were handling the arrangements. I told her that I needed tickets for me and Javon. Then, maybe two days before the ceremony, we were getting ready to head out and I got a call. I answered, and there was this woman crying on the other end of the phone. She said, “Bill, it’s Joanna.”

Joanna? I didn’t know any Joanna. I said, “Who?”