The L.A. County Coroner’s office has finished all of its testing on the remains of Michael Jackson’s body in the an effort to find the cause of his mysterious death on June 25 — but it will be another few weeks before the results are released to the public, a spokesman for the coroner told TheWrap.
Shortly after the 50-year-old Jackson’s death, the coroner initially reported that the cause of Jackson’s death could not be determined, prompting a deeper investigation into how he died.
"The final report has not been completed," the spokesman said. "It probably will be another two to three weeks." After the first testing on Jackson, the coroner’s office said it would take four to six weeks before the results of toxicology tests would be ready.
Now that the physical testing has been done, examiners and others involved will have to sit down and write up their reports before making anything public. In short, the spokesman said, they are just waiting for the paperwork.
A insider close to the Jackson family said one of the problems investigators have had in the hunt to find clues to the singer’s death is the location of what is called metabolites. These are the products of metabolism — or how a drug is processed when it goes through the body.
Investigators must comb tox reports to find clues of the drug in its metabolized state. Making it more difficult, some drugs remain in a body for a very short time before becoming very difficult to trace, if at all. One of these is a powerful anesthetic drug Jackson used to help him sleep.
The coroner’s spokesman said he did not know the results of an independent autopsy that Jackson’s family conducted after the coroner’s initial report.