According to medical records, Michael Jackson’s heart beat briefly at a hospital emergency room, but he was “long gone” by then.
That was enough for Joe Jackson, the father of the late singer, to file a wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Conrad Murray, attorney Brian Oxman said. The lawsuit accuses Murray, who was Jackson’s personal physician at the time, of causing his death by delaying the call for an ambulance. “The bottom line is, had [paramedics] gotten there earlier and had they been called right away, chances are he could have been revived,” Oxman said.
A prosecution report leaked last week included a witness statement which said Murray stopped resuscitating Jackson so he could collect and hide propofol bottles from view. Oxman called that delay “an outrageous departure from the standard of care.”
“There was cardiac activity, electrical impulses, and he did have a cardiac rhythm which they got going through their resuscitation,” Oxman said of Jackson. “But he could not sustain it on his own.”
Joe Jackson’s angle in this lawsuit is to get a cut of the Michael Jackson financial pie he was purposely left out of from the will. But is this right? And although Dr. Murray may have administered the lethal injections of propofol that eventually killed Jackson, how responsible was Michael in causing his own death?
