Concert producer `had a very strong feeling` that Michael Jackson was dying

New York: An associate producer on Michael Jackson`s `This Is It` concert made a panicked phone call five days before the death of the singer, saying that she feared that the singer was on the verge of death.

Alif Sankey testified on Wednesday that she made the 1:30 a.m. call to tour director Kenny Ortega after Michael appeared painfully thin, cold and disoriented at a costume fitting the evening of June 19, 2009. She said that Michael had been rambling on to Ortega about how "God was speaking to him, and he didn`t understand why God was speaking to him." Sankey explained that the incident left Ortega in tears. While she was driving home from the rehearsal space that night, she pulled over and called Ortega to relay her feelings that Michael was dying, the New York Daily News reported. She said that she was very upset, and was screaming into the phone at that point, asserting that she said "He needs to be put in the hospital now." Michael`s mother Katherine, 82, sat in the front row and showed little emotion when footage of the King of Pop dancing with Sankey in the 1987 `Smooth Criminal` video was played for jurors. Katherine`s lawyer Brian Panish asked Sankey how Ortega reacted when she made the phone call from her car. She said that Ortega kept listening to her as she kept saying that Michael was dying and he needed to be put in the hospital; she asked him to do something. Katherine has claimed that AEG Live should be held accountable for negligently hiring and poorly supervising Dr Conrad Murray convicted of providing the surgery-strength anesthetic that killed Michael on June 25, 2009. Meanwhile, AEG has denied any wrongdoing, maintaining that it was Michael`s choice to hire Murray and undergo risky infusions of propofol to treat his insomnia. Under cross examination by AEG, Sankey admitted that Michael returned for follow-up rehearsals closer to his death and appeared stronger and more coherent and even performed a rendition of `Thriller` that she called "great." ANI