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LA police search for Jackson’s doctor

Michael Jackson adorns the cover of the Feb. 17, 1983, edition of Rolling Stone magazine. PHOTO: AP

A doctor who apparently went missing after treating Michael Jackson before his sudden death is being sought by the Los Angeles police and coroner’s office.

Police said they had impounded the doctor’s car after it was left outside Jackson’s rented Bel Air mansion. A police spokesman said they wanted to talk to the doctor because he had not signed a death certificate, which is normal procedure for an attending physician.

With a post mortem under way, speculation is mounting that the 50-year-old pop star’s death may be linked to his longstanding use of painkillers. Family friends have confirmed he was taking drugs to help him deal with the stress of preparing for a major concert tour. Media reports have suggested that a doctor injected him with a morphine-like drug a few hours before he collapsed and went into cardiac arrest.

Jackson was pronounced dead shortly after being taken to a Los Angeles hospital on Thursday. On Friday a post mortem was being carried out at the Los Angeles county coroner’s office. The examination was expected to include a full toxicology analysis looking for any chemicals or drugs in his system.

Brian Oxman, a Jackson family lawyer, confirmed the star had been taking drugs to deal with a variety of pain problems. He said there had been longstanding concerns about Jackson’s drug use and the people he had surrounded himself with.

“I do not know the extent of the medications that he was taking, but the reports we have been receiving in the family are that it was extensive. This is something that I feared and something that I warned about,” Oxman said. “I can only tell you that this is not something which has been unexpected ... This family has been trying for months and months to take care of Michael Jackson. The people who have surrounded him have been enabling him.”

Enabling is a psychological term for allowing or helping a person to continue their addiction.

TMZ, the celebrity gossip Web site that reported Jackson’s demise within 15 minutes of the official time of death, reported yesterday that the star had received an injection of the synthetic painkiller Demerol on Thursday morning and that he started having difficulty breathing shortly afterward. The Los Angeles police department, or LAPD, whose robbery-homicide detectives are investigating the death, would not comment on the report about the injection and would not name the doctor.

But they did confirm that officers impounded the doctor’s car and said they wanted to talk to him.

An LAPD spokesman told the Guardian: “They [police officers and the coroner’s office] haven’t interviewed him yet. Whether they know where he is, or whether they can get to him, I don’t know.”

“You have to understand, when a doctor hasn’t signed a death certificate, that’s an issue. When an attending physician is unwilling or unable to sign a certificate, it immediately triggers a coroner’s investigation. It’s now part of the overall death investigation,” the LAPD spokesman said.

Full answers may take days or weeks, but Jackson had a long history of taking painkillers including Demerol, and wrote about it in his 1997 song Morphine. Medical experts said Demerol could easily lead to the sort of cardiac arrest suffered by Jackson, particularly if taken in conjunction with other drugs.

Jackson’s brother Jermaine told a news conference that a doctor made extensive efforts to revive Jackson at the house in the 40 minutes or so before an ambulance came to take him to the University of California medical center, a few minutes’ drive away.

Jermaine Jackson described how paramedics continued to try to revive Michael in the ambulance and how staff at UCLA did the same thing.

“Upon arriving at the hospital at 1.14pm, a team of doctors, including emergency physicians and a cardiologist, worked to resuscitate him for a period of more than one hour but were unsuccessful,” Jermaine said.

Michael Jackson was officially pronounced dead at 2.26pm, two hours and four minutes after the first emergency call was placed from his home.

He had been rehearsing hard for a 50-date concert tour starting at the O2 arena in London on July 13. Colleagues who saw him at his last rehearsal at the Staples Center, a sports arena and convention center in downtown Los Angeles, have said he showed no signs of major distress, although he looked thin and frail.

Family and members of his concert entourage had expressed concern over the past two months that Jackson was not physically up to the tour.

The date of the first concert was put back by six days, ostensibly to give more time to rehearse.

The whole tour was widely regarded as a big risk for the promoter, AEG Live, which has sunk more than US$20 million into the project and will have to refund tickets to about 750,000 fans. Jackson had a track record of canceling tour dates and provoking lawsuits. AEG Live has been embroiled in a dispute with another promoter that alleged the entire tour was a breach of its own contract with Jackson.
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