Saturday, June 27, 2009

Pop star's family wants answers, Jesse Jackson says

Michael Jackson's family suspects that the singer's personal doctor, Conrad Murray, knows more about Jackson's death, but they have been unable to contact him, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told CNN on Saturday.The parents need to know what happened in the last hours of their son's life, according to Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist and Baptist minister unrelated to Michael Jackson.
Murray is believed to be the last person to see Michael Jackson alive.
"The routine inquiry is now an investigation," Jesse Jackson said. "They [the Jacksons] didn't know the doctor. ... He should have met with the family, given them comfort on the last hours of their son."
Police, who met briefly with Murray after the singer's death, have been able to reach him and are trying to set up an interview, Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Charlie Beck told the Los Angeles Times on Friday. Police said the doctor has been fully cooperative.
Detectives impounded Murray's car, which was parked at the singer's rented home, because it may contain evidence related to Michael Jackson's death.
Police have released no information on what they may have found.
Michael Jackson died Thursday, and an autopsy was performed the following day. The body was taken to an undisclosed mortuary Friday night.A spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner's office told reporters Friday that more tests must be conducted before a cause of death can be determined. That could take four to six weeks. Jesse Jackson visited the family compound in Encino, California, on Friday.
"I talked with Mrs. Jackson and with the father, Joe, and she could not fight back the tears. She said, 'My baby is gone. Michael was such a good son. I loved him so much. I miss my baby.'"

The family wants to hear Murray's account of what happened, but they can't locate him, Jesse Jackson said.
"The doctor's bizarre behavior here is creating all these suspicions," he said. There are lingering questions, such as: 'How long had he stopped breathing? How long had he been unconscious?'"
He said the family may decide to pursue its own inquiry.
"At this point it [the investigation] is very incomplete," he said. "... They need an independent autopsy to get even more answers to questions that are now being driven by the gap between when Michael was last seen alive and [when] he was pronounced dead day before yesterday."
The possibility that Michael Jackson was taking medication that could have contributed to his death at age 50 weighs heavily on people close to the star.
In 2005, after he was cleared on charges of child molestation, Jackson spent a week at a center run by Dr. Deepak Chopra, a physician who focuses on spirituality and the mind-body connection.
During that week, the pop star asked Chopra for a prescription for a narcotic, the doctor told CNN.
"I said, 'What the heck do you want a narcotic prescription for?'" Chopra said. "And it suddenly dawned on me that he was probably taking these and that he had probably a number of doctors who were giving him these prescriptions, so I confronted him with that. At first, he denied it. Then, he said he was in a lot of pain."
Chopra said he told Jackson that there were plenty of other ways to handle his pain, but that Jackson was not convinced.
He blamed Jackson's death on drug abuse, though he offered no direct evidence.
"When you have enough drugs in your system, your heart goes into an arrhythmia and your respiration stops," he said. "I think the drugs killed him."
Brian Oxman, a former lawyer for the Jackson family who was in the emergency room Thursday, also expressed concern about medications the pop star was taking.
"I talked to this family about it, I warned them -- I said that Michael is overmedicating and that I did not want to see this kind of a case develop," Oxman told CNN's "American Morning" on Friday.
He referred to Anna Nicole Smith, the former model and reality television star who died of an overdose in 2007.
"I said, 'If that's what's going to happen to Michael, it's all going to break our hearts.' And my worst fears are here," he said.
Oxman emphasized that he did not know what killed Jackson, and was not making accusations against anyone.
Jackson was in cardiac arrest when paramedics took him Thursday from his home to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where the music idol was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m. (5:26 p.m. ET).
In a 911 call released Friday, an unidentified caller told a dispatcher to send help. He told the dispatcher that Jackson was not breathing and Jackson's doctor was performing CPR on a bed.



Jackson had been preparing for a comeback tour -- aimed at extending his legendary career and helping him to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Jackson is survived by his three children, Prince Michael I, Paris and Prince Michael II.
Source:CNN

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