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Michael Jackson’s personal “Dr. Feelgood” tried to Moonwalk his way through a police interrogation, according to a tape played for jurors at his trial yesterday.
Dr. Conrad Murray insisted to cops that he was paying close attention to the King of Pop as he administered a dose of the powerful anesthetic propofol to treat the singer’s insomnia.
“I was gone for two minutes … Everything happened quickly,” Murray said in his thick Grenadian accent.
But the doctor’s words may be a big blow to his credibility. Cellphone records show he couldn’t have been watching closely over Jackson because he spent the hour before Jacko’s death making a slew of phone calls.
Murray told the Los Angeles Police Department during a meeting at a Ritz-Carlton hotel on June 27, 2009, two days after Jackson’s death, that he had given him an injection and a drip of propofol to help him sleep.
On the tape, Murray said that he left the singer for only two minutes to go the bathroom and that when he came back, Jackson was unconscious.
“I monitored him for a long enough period that I felt comfortable. Then I needed to go the restroom to release myself,” he said on the tape.
“Now I came back to his bedside. Then I got a sense he wasn’t breathing.”
In another contradiction, Murray told cops he had immediately performed CPR. But according to testimony at trial, the doctor did not know how to perform CPR.
Also, he claimed he couldn’t call 911 as there were no phones in Jacko’s home because the singer wanted to avoid being called.
This also was contradicted by phone records.
Yesterday was the first time that Murray’s interview with cops had been played for the public.
He told the cops Jacko had told him other doctors helped him to sleep 15 to 18 hours a day, noting “he’s not able to sleep naturally.”
Murray said that on the day of his death, Jacko begged: “I’d like to have some milk” — his name for propofol.
“He said, ‘Please, please, give me some milk so that I can sleep, because I know that this is all that really works for me.”
Murray said he decided to give Jacko “because I cared about him. I did not want him to fail. I had no intentions of hurting him. … I love Mr. Jackson, he was my friend.”
Only about half of the taped interview was played in court yesterday. But court officials later released the transcript of the whole interview.
In the segments of the tape not yet played in court, Murray talked about how he met Jackson’s mom Katherine at the hospital and he heard her asking another doctor “’Well, how is he?’ ’He’s not dead, is he?”’
The doctor said ‘Yes’ and she broke down,” Murray said.
He said Jacko’s kids — Prince, Paris and Blanket — were “weeping, really weeping” after they “found that daddy wasn’t doing well, that he had passed away. “
On Thursday, Murray’s lawyers argued the singer gave himself a fatal dose of propofol on June 25, 2009.