When, exactly, did Dr. Conrad Murray find Michael Jackson unresponsive? The way things are going, anyone's account should be surrounded in misquotation marks.
On Tuesday, Hollywood criminal defense lawyer Michael Flanagan, who's new to Team Murray, was quoted on RadarOnline.com [1] as saying that the doctor made a mistake when speaking to investigators.
"Dr. Murray's timeline of events that day when Michael Jackson died is wrong,” Flanagan says. “Doctors make mistakes, and that is what he did, and it was simply just that, a mistake.”
That doesn't exactly jibe with what Murray lead attorney Ed Chernoff insisted last summer: that police had botched the doctor's version of events.
"The timeline reported by law enforcement (in a search-warrant affidavit) was not obtained through interviews with Dr. Murray, as was implied," the Houston-based Chernoff said in an August statement on his website. "Dr. Murray simply never told investigators that he found Michael Jackson at 11:00 a.m. not breathing."
Contacted by TheWrap on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Chernoff's law firm first told TheWrap that Flanagan's
comments were "news to us." She called back later to say, unequivocally, that Flanagan never told the Radar reporter that Murray screwed up -- only that he reiterated what Chernoff said in August.
Radar top editor David Perel told TheWrap that there's no doubt Flanagan (right) said what the site reported -- offering a possible glimpse into the defensive game-plan.
"He said it," Perel said Tuesday night. "You will see that they will move the timeline as we've said they will when they go to trial. ... Flanagan is an excellent attorney; he's come in and reviewed the case and re-interviewed for the case. It's ridiculous to question the veracity of our reporting."
The timeline will be critical in Los Angeles prosecutors' plan to prosecute [2] Murray. While it's not clear what version of events they will present at trial, police came up with this blow-by-blow in a search warrant last summer:
• Sometime before 11 a.m. on June 25, Murray gave Jackson a series of sedatives, and topped it off with a dose of propofol that put Jackson to sleep.
• Murray then stayed with Jackson for 10 minutes and left to go to the bathroom, returning less than two minutes later to find the singer had stopped breathing.
• Phone records show three separate calls Murray placed between 11:18 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. ... to whom is still unclear.
• At 12:21, someone finally calls 911 -- Murray told investigators he was administering CPR at the time.
(To muddle matters further, a new voicemail message released Monday reveals a calm and collected Murray telling another patient about heart test results at 11:54 a.m.)
Radar reported that Flanagan didn't give more specifics about when Murray found Jackson unresponsive, but the lawyer did say he believed there was another, yet-to-be-discovered phone call.
If Murray really did administer propofol at 10:50 a.m., as police claim, and was calmly calling patients more than an hour later, it could indicate that he had not stayed by Jackson's side to monitor him -- considered a critical practice when administering the powerful knockout anesthetic.
Although doctors do make mistakes. Or so we're ... told?