Michael Jackson died in 2009 at a hospital in Los Angeles, and his autopsy report said the coroner determined the 50-year-old singer died of acute propofol intoxication. The finding remains the clearest answer to the question that followed his death, even as renewed attention on the movie Michael has pushed the case back into public view.
That answer was later tested in court, where a Los Angeles jury found Conrad Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors said Murray was an incompetent physician who used the anesthetic propofol without the proper safeguards, while the defense argued Jackson perished from a drug overdose. described propofol as a fast-acting hospital sedative, administered intravenously and used before anesthetics, and reported that Murray allegedly gave Jackson the drug to help him sleep.
Entertainment Weekly reported that Jackson was also using Valium, lorazepam and midazolam, a drug mix that underscored how dependent he had become on help sleeping in the days before his death. The Los Angeles Times published a transcript of a June 27, 2009, interview Murray gave to two Los Angeles Police Department detectives at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey, where he described the long hours he spent trying in vain to get Jackson to sleep with drugs other than propofol.
In that account, Murray said that around 10:40 a.m. he gave Jackson 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine. He said he left the room for roughly two minutes to use the restroom and returned to find Jackson had stopped breathing. It was the kind of detail that later made the case so hard to separate from the celebrity surrounding it: a private bedside decision, a fatal outcome and a record that put the blame on one doctor.
Murray served about two years in prison and was released in 2013, according to People. The same report said he later returned to practicing medicine and opened the DCM Medical Institute in El Socorro, San Juan, in Trinidad and Tobago. The renewed attention around Jackson’s death may keep the focus on the film and its controversy, but the central medical conclusion has not changed: Jackson died from acute propofol intoxication, and Murray was later convicted for his role in the case.
