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LOS ANGELES: Michael Jackson's doctor was distracted in the hours before the singer's death by phone exchanges with three women, whose relations with the medic should be explained in court, prosecutors said.
Preparing for Conrad Murray's manslaughter trial, they called Thursday for the nature of Conrad Murray's ties with the women - including a cocktail waitress and a Spearmint Rhino club dancer - to be allowed in evidence.
“The details of these relationships are relevant to show Dr. Murray's level of inattentiveness and distraction while he was responsible for the care of Mr. Jackson,” they said in a legal document detailing phone exchanges.
“The evidence also serves to impeach Dr. Murray's own account of the events leading up to Mr. Jackson's death since Dr. Murray never made mention of any telephone activities in his statements to LAPD detectives,” they added.
Prosecutors allege that Murray, 58, “abandoned his patient” after administering the powerful sedative propofol to help Jackson sleep, and then tried to cover it up after the singer's death on June 25, 2009.
Murray is due to go to court on May 9. In the legal request made Thursday, prosecutors listed details of telephone exchanges with the women and the background to their relationships with Murray.
Murray telephoned Sade Anding, a cocktail waitress he met in a Houston restaurant in March 2009, at 11:51 am on the day Jackson died, and had an 11 minute conversation with her, the prosecutors said.
“The jury will be able to infer that Dr. Murray had the desire to talk to and listen to Ms. Anding during the time he should have been watching and attending to Mr. Jackson,” the prosecutors wrote.
Bridgette Morgan, who met Murray in a Las Vegas club in 2003 and dated him until 2005, called him twice on the morning of Jackson's death to discuss the medic's offer to pay for her to fly to Las Vegas for her birthday.
Michelle Bella, a dancer at a Spearmint Rhino club in Las Vegas where she met Murray in February 2008, received a text message from him at 8:30 am on the day of Jackson's death, it said.
Murray acknowledged that he had used propofol, but insisted that on the day of the 50-year-old singer's death he administered only a small amount of the drug that should not have been fatal.
Jackson was eventually pronounced dead at 2:26 pm at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, but paramedics estimated that he had already been dead for at least 20 minutes when they arrived following a 911 call.
