DEATH OF A POP ICON
Remembering Michael Jackson, 10 years on
Michael Jackson spent the final days of his incredible – but ultimately controversial – life doing what he had done since he was 5 years old: performing. The singer was in rehearsals for his This Is It concert tour at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. “He had great energy,” producer Ken Ehrlich, an executive at AEG, the company that was promoting the singer’s tour, told WHO in June 2009. “He really looked good and he was very upbeat.” Jackson was “cracking jokes”, added Ehrlich. “He was having a good time. During rehearsal, I could tell that he was feeling it. He was on his way to giving a great performance.”
With his comeback set to begin on July 8, 2009, Jackson had been drained by chronic insomnia that had him often missing rehearsals and relying heavily on his personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray. On June 24, he rallied to run through classics such as ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Thriller’ until midnight. “He’d take the stage with this group of dancers, all in their 20s, but you couldn’t take your eyes off him,” Dorian
Holley, the tour’s vocal director told Time magazine in 2009. “He would sing through all the parts rapid-fire to show us what he wanted. We would just sit there with our jaws open – it was awesome. He could still do everything ... The only difference now was that he would sometimes talk about how it made him sore.”
Murray testified that he attended to the singer in the bedroom of his Holmby Hills home just after 1am on June 25. Over the next few hours, Murray said he administered a series of drugs in an attempt to help the singer sleep, alleging Jackson said at one point: “Just make me sleep, no matter what.”
Murray later described the scene in detail in his 2016 book, This Is It: The Secret lives of Dr Conrad Murray and Michael Jackson. “He just couldn’t lay still, could not relax,” he wrote. “As the night progressed, he gradually grew to look much like his image in his ‘Thriller’ video.”
Murray has told police that he gave in to Jackson’s demands at 10.40am, pushing 25mg of Propofol (a sedative and anaesthetic) into the IV. Murray left the room and Jackson stopped breathing. The coroner concluded that Jackson died from acute Propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication and that he had a “polypharmacy” of drugs in his system. The king of pop was dead at 50. An outpouring of global grief crescendoed at a memorial at the Staples Center on July 7. Around 100,000 fans filled the surrounding streets and 1.6 million people entered a lottery for 17,500 tickets to the service. Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter, Paris – alongside brothers Prince Michael, 12, and 7-year-old Blanket – spontaneously stepped to the microphone: “Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine,” she said through tears. “And I just wanted to say I love him so much.”
The 90-minute event included performances by Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder and was estimated to have cost the City of Los Angeles $2 million. “This has been the most difficult time for me and my family,” Jackson’s father, Joseph, told WHO at the time. “We will not stop until we get justice for Michael.”
The justice they were seeking came after Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter in February 2010. During a six-week trial, prosecutors portrayed Murray as a reckless doctor and a jury deliberated for 10 hours before finding him guilty in November 2011. His medical licence was revoked and after serving two years of his four-year sentence, he was released in October 2013.
In a post-prison interview with The Daily Mail, Murray said Jackson was “in crisis at the end of his life, filled with panic and misery”. “By the end, Michael Jackson was a broken man,” he said. “I tried to protect him but instead I was brought down with him.”