Michael Jackson's Final Hours

At 10pm on Wednesday Michael Jackson arrived at the 20,000-seat Staples Centre arena in downtown Los Angeles to rehearse for a comeback tour that he would not live to embark on.

His band, backing singers and dancers had been kept waiting for three hours to go through the show that was intended to regild his crown as the King of Pop. They saw a thin, listless and lethargic figure take the stage.

Despite his frailty and increasingly fading resemblance to the vigorous showman he had been two decades ago, Jackson practiced late into the night. If he was unusually ill or upset, those present at the Staples Centre say they saw no sign of it.

Until the results of the autopsy and toxicology tests are released, no one knows whether it was the strain of rehearsals, or the singer's drug use, or both, that pitched him into a cardiac arrest less than 12 hours later.

The first signs that something was wrong came at 12.21pm the next day when a phone call from Jackson's rented mansion in the upmarket west LA neighborhood was put through to the city's fire department.

Forty-two seconds later, according to Captain Steve Ruda of the LAFD, four firefighters and two paramedics set off, arriving at Jackson's house just over three minutes later.

They arrived to find Jackson's personal doctor trying to resuscitate his patient, who had stopped breathing and was in full cardiac arrest. For the next 42 minutes, the paramedics administered CPR before taking him to the nearby UCLA medical center at 1.14pm.

Although doctors there spent an hour battling to revive Jackson, their efforts proved fruitless and he was pronounced dead at 2.26pm.

By this time, web reports about Jackson's health had begun to circulate, with the celebrity website TMZ saying the star had been taken to hospital.

At 2.44pm TMZ reported the news that Jackson had died.

The web reports were confirmed by Jackson's older brother Jermaine.

"My brother, the legendary King of Pop Michael Jackson, passed away on Thursday 25 June 2009 at 2.26pm," he told a press conference at the hospital.

"It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home. However, the cause of his death is unknown until results of the autopsy are known.

"His personal physician who was with him at the time attempted to resuscitate my brother, as did the paramedics who transported him to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Upon arriving at the hospital at approximately 1.14pm, a team of doctors including emergency physicians and cardiologists attempted to resuscitate him for a period of more than hour, and they were unsuccessful."

Frank DiLeo, Jackson's manager, told the Los Angeles Times: "I got to kiss him and tell him goodbye. I lost a very dear friend, someone who I admired, someone who was the greatest talent I ever met or worked with."