Michael Jackson’s Final Morning Was Much Nastier Than You Thought.
When the paramedics came through the door of that bedroom in the hills above Los Angeles at 12:26 on the afternoon of June 25, the first thing one of them noticed was not the man on the bed.
It was the doctor standing over him with a plastic grocery bag in his hand, picking things up off the floor one at a time and dropping them in.
That small strange picture sits at the center of the last morning of Elias Vance’s life, and it does not fit the story Dr. Marcus Reed told the police.
So we are going to begin at midnight with a tired man coming home from rehearsal and follow every hour until that bag appears.
Most of us have heard the morning told in a sentence or two.
A famous man could not sleep.
A doctor gave him something, and by lunchtime he was gone.
It is short and tidy and it leaves out almost everything that matters.
So I am going to stay with what was said under oath and with what the doctor himself told the police, and I am going to mark whose words are whose as we go.
The object that holds this story together is a plastic grocery bag, and it appears three times.
The first time is in the hands of a paramedic who walked into a bedroom and saw a physician cleaning up instead of performing CPR.
The second time is on a table in an evidence room, where a detective opened it and found thirteen empty vials and one half-used vial of a surgical anesthetic and a rubber tourniquet and a roll of tape.
And the third time is in a courtroom, where a prosecutor held up the bag and said, “This is what the defendant was holding when help arrived. Not a syringe. Not the patient’s hand. A bag.”
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
The bag comes later.
The story starts in the dark, long before anyone thought to look at a clock.
Elias Vance came home from rehearsal shortly after midnight.
That is the plain beginning.
No shouting, no scene, no crowd at the gate.
A man who had been working came back to his house and he could not sleep, and Dr. Marcus Reed, who was there as his private physician, began treating the insomnia.
I find that the most unsettling part of it, how ordinary it all sounds at the start.
A tired man, a late hour, a doctor at hand.
The sort of thing a family might have said a thousand times about a thousand different nights.
What follows comes from Reed’s own interview with the police, and I will say so each time, because every drug and every dose in this part of the story rests on his word alone.
Reed told police that a benzodiazepine had no effect, so by his account he moved on and began with two milligrams of lorazepam.
That is a sedative and it was meant to do what the first drug had not done.
Reed told police that it did not put Vance to sleep either, so he reached for another, and he told police that the next sedative failed as well.
One medicine and then a second and then a third, each one following the failure of the one before it, and the night still going on.
I want you to notice the shape of that, because it is the shape of the whole morning.
Nothing in it is a single decision.
It is a ladder and every rung is another small step down in the same direction with the sun getting closer all the while.
By Reed’s telling, the night did not end when the sky grew light.
Reed told police he gave another dose of the second sedative around 7:30 that morning.
Think of the hours between midnight and that moment and of how many hours had passed since Vance came home from rehearsal.
Then according to Reed came the request.
He told police that around 10:00 Vance was complaining that he could not sleep and that Vance asked him for propofol.
That is Reed’s account and it is the account he gave when he was explaining himself to detectives.
Whether it happened exactly that way is something only the two men in that room could ever have said, and one of them is no longer here to say it.
I will tell you what Reed said next, and I will keep it exactly as he gave it.
Reed told police that at 10:40 that morning he gave Vance 25 milligrams of propofol.
He described it as half of his usual dose.
Half.
It is a careful word, a reassuring word, the kind a man chooses when he wants you to picture caution and a steady hand.
Then Reed said he watched Vance.
And after a while, he said he needed to use the bathroom.
He told detectives he was gone about two minutes.
Let me slow down on that last claim because it is the hinge of everything Reed told the police.
He said he watched Vance and then he said he left the room.
A man who has just given a patient a powerful sedative and who by his own account had been giving him one drug after another through the night stepped out of that bedroom.
I am not going to tell you what that means because I was not there and neither were you.
But I will tell you that it is the sort of detail a listener should hold on to, the way you hold a coin you suspect is not quite what it looks like, turning it over in your hand until you can see both faces.
Two minutes, 25 milligrams, half the usual dose.
Listen to how small every one of those numbers sounds.
And notice that every one of them comes out of the mouth of the man who had the most reason to make them small.
A number is only a fact when somebody other than the speaker can check it, and in the hours that follow, other people did check, with their phones and with their testimony and with what they saw when they came through that bedroom door.
The phone records are where that tidy little bathroom story begins to come apart.
They tell a more crowded tale than two minutes behind a closed door, and they do not depend on anyone’s memory or anyone’s kindness.
Start with the window between 10:00 and 10:40 that morning, the stretch before the propofol when Vance was still awake and still waiting.
According to the phone records, Reed was on the line with an employee from his office in Las Vegas for eight minutes during that window, and the call ended at about 10:42.
Sit for a moment with that time.
10:42 is two minutes after the hour Reed gave police for the propofol.
So a call that by the records ran right up to the minutes when Reed says he gave Vance a powerful drug.
The phone company kept that time and it does not depend on anyone’s memory.
And it was not a single call.
The records show that in the final hour before Reed’s discovery of Vance, he spent 46 minutes on the phone.
46 minutes out of 60.
More than half an hour of that was with his Las Vegas office, and that is a medical practice, a business, a world far from the bedroom in the hills where his patient lay.
And in the middle of all this, the records show a 22-minute call with his daughter, a call that took place while Vance was struggling to fall asleep.
I will say what I felt reading that number.
Twenty-two minutes is a long time to talk to anyone, and it seems a very long time to talk when the man down the hall is the only patient who matters that morning.
I do not know what was said on that call and nobody has told us, but the length of it is a fact, and so is the hour it fell in.
Then comes a name from the witness stand.
A patient named Robert Sellers testified that Reed returned his phone message at 11:49 that morning.
11:49.
A doctor with a famous patient in his care was calling back about other business.
Two minutes later, at 11:51, Reed called a woman named Sandra Ingram.
She testified about what happened on that call, and it is one of the strangest pieces of testimony in the whole case.
About five or six minutes in, she realized he was no longer paying attention.
The line was still open but the man on it had gone somewhere else, and what she heard as she held her phone were voices and coughing and mumbling, not a word she could make out, just the sounds of a room where something had gone wrong, carried down a telephone line to a stranger who had only called to talk.
Imagine being her.
You pick up a call that is meant to be ordinary and you end up listening to the edge of an emergency with no way of knowing what it is.
Now we come to the moment that everything turns on, and I am going to handle it with care.
Prosecutors contend that Reed discovered Vance was not breathing at around noon.
That is their contention and it is where they placed it.
Reed told police something different in its shape.
He said he came back from the bathroom, found Vance not breathing, and began CPR and mouth-to-mouth.
So there are two tellings and between them lies a stretch of the morning that no one has ever filled in for us.
I am not going to name the moment Vance stopped breathing because no one has been able to say, and a narrator who guesses is no better than a doctor who rounds down.
But I will tell you what the records do show about time.
They show a phone call that ran until about 10:42, a long stretch of calls in the last hour, and a 911 call that went in at about 12:20.
Those are the times that belong to phone companies and dispatchers, and they do not bend around anyone’s recollection.
And so the morning stands in two columns.
On one side are the things Reed told detectives in his own words and at his own pace, with all the time in the world to arrange them.
On the other are the things that other people saw and heard and recorded without any plan at all.
A chef in a kitchen, a guard on a staircase, a patient waiting for a return call, a woman holding a telephone and listening to a room she could not see.
None of them set out to build a case, and I think that is exactly why their small plain accounts carry the weight that they do.
When ordinary people who do not know one another begin to describe the same morning, the pieces start to fit, and what they fit against is not always the story that was told first.
Kai Navarro, the chef who worked in that house, later testified about what she saw of that moment.
By her testimony, Reed came running down the stairs shouting for help.
He shouted for security and he shouted for the son.
She also testified that the doctor never asked her to call 911.
A woman who cooked for the family was handed the alarm of the worst morning that household had known, and the man with the medical degree did not ask her for the one call that anyone would expect.
Up the stairs went the security chief, Fahim Rahman, and a guard named Alberto Reyes.
What they found in that bedroom they later described to a courtroom.
Reyes testified that the youngest child screamed “Daddy” and that Reed said not to let the children see their father like this.
Rahman testified that the daughter was on the ground crying and that the son had a shocked look on his face.
That is all the testimony gives us and it is enough.
I will not add a single word to the picture of those two children because it needs none.
I only hope somebody held them that day.
The security chief and the guard were not medical men.
They were there to protect a family, and for years that was the whole of their work, standing in hallways, watching doors, keeping strangers out.
And on that afternoon the danger was already inside the house, in a bedroom with the curtains of an ordinary day around it.
They went up those stairs because a doctor was shouting for help, and what they were asked to do once they got there was not what any guard is trained for.
It was a long way from the front gate and a long way from the kind of morning anybody in that house had planned for.
Now go back to the question of the telephone.
Reed told police he could not call 911 right away because the house phones did not work and he did not know the address.
That is his explanation in his words.
Meanwhile the assistant, Michael Amir Williams, testified that Reed left him a voicemail asking for a call back and that he was never told to call 911.
When the two men did speak, Williams recalled, Reed said Vance had a bad reaction and told him to get someone up there immediately.
A bad reaction.
Not the word a man uses when he wants the whole street to come running.
Reyes told a different story about those minutes and a more physical one.
He testified that Reed grabbed a handful of vials and asked him to put them in a bag and that he did so before he called 911.
He said Reed attempted CPR on the bed rather than on the floor and that Reed said it was his first time doing mouth-to-mouth.
When Reyes did reach the dispatcher he told her Reed was pumping Vance’s chest but that Vance was not responding.
The call went in at about 12:20 in the afternoon.
Six minutes later at 12:26 the paramedics walked in, and you already know what the first of them saw.
Richard Senn found Reed holding that bag, picking items up off the floor.
The monitor showed a flatline.
Reed mentioned the sedative and nothing about propofol, and he claimed the arrest had happened right when he called.
A second paramedic heard something shorter still, that Vance had been down for about one minute.
A minute.
A moment.
Two minutes in a bathroom.
Every number the doctor offered was small, and I noticed that none of the small ones ever matched the others.
The ambulance carried Vance to the university medical center where he arrived at about 1:14 in the afternoon.
Doctors worked for more than an hour trying to bring him back.
The emergency physician testified that he was clinically dead on arrival with no pulse.
At 2:26 that afternoon on the 25th of June the hospital announced that Elias Vance had died, and a witness testified that Reed called her from the ambulance and told her not to be alarmed.
On the 28th of August the county coroner ruled the death a homicide from acute propofol intoxication.
Reed, who did not testify, denies guilt.
His defense argued that Vance administered extra drugs to himself, and that is the argument his side made and it remains part of the record.
The prosecution argued that Reed gave more propofol than he ever admitted to police.
Consider the two hours between the first call and the last.
Reed told police he gave Vance 25 milligrams of propofol at 10:40 in the morning and that he stepped away for about two minutes.
Yet the phone records show an eight-minute call with a Las Vegas office employee that ended about 10:42.
They show 46 minutes on the phone in the final hour before Vance was found, and more than half an hour of it with that same Las Vegas office.
A man can say two minutes and a telephone company can say something else, and the telephone company has no reason to round.
Then there is the patient Robert Sellers, who testified that Reed returned his message at 11:49.
Two minutes later at 11:51 Reed called Sandra Ingram, and about five or six minutes into that call she realized he was no longer paying attention to her.
She heard voices and coughing and mumbling.
That is where the call stops being a conversation and becomes a kind of recording of the room.
Prosecutors contend Reed found Vance not breathing around noon.
Reed told police he came back and found him that way and began CPR and mouth-to-mouth.
Between those two accounts a good many minutes went by, and I find that hard to set down without feeling cold.
What is left then are the gaps.
The hours before the first dose of the second sedative.
The minutes on the phone.
The stretch between a bathroom door and a bedroom floor when no one in that house said a thing that anyone could hold on to.
A house full of people saw pieces of that morning and each of them was asked afterward what they had seen.
The only person who could have told it whole kept his clock to himself, and the silence he left behind is the real last chapter of the day.
