Michael Jackson’s body lay on a metal gurney in the county morgue in downtown Los Angeles. He was dressed in shiny black trousers, a thin hospital gown and nothing else. His feet were bare, his left arm scored with needle marks. His pale, narrow chest was covered in bruises – evidence of the medical efforts over the past few hours to save his life. Doctors and security guards milled in and out of the little room containing the gurney, eager to catch a glimpse of Jackson‘s body.
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It had started that Thursday morning, when Jackson’s own live-in doctor had tried frantically to revive him. By the time the medics arrived, responding to a desperate call to 911 at 12:21 p.m., they wanted to pronounce him dead on the spot. But Michael Jackson couldn’t be dead. His body was lifted into the back of an ambulance and rushed to UCLA Medical Center, where a team of doctors worked for another hour, pounding a defibrillator on Jackson’s chest, all of them hoping that they could keep one of music’s greatest entertainers from ending up in this morgue.
