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Los Angeles. Michael Jackson’s doctor faced mounting scrutiny on Wednesday after a pharmacist said he had ordered more than 250 vials of a powerful sedative in the two months before the star’s 2009 overdose death.

Pharmacist Tim Lopez said on Tuesday that Conrad Murray, on trial for involuntary manslaughter, never told him he was Jackson’s personal physician and did not say who the sedative, known as propofol, was for.

Murray placed the orders for the drug, and a number of other medications including a skin-whitening cream, with his company Applied Pharmacy Services, Lopez told the Los Angeles Superior Court.

“He asked me specifically to find pricing and availability of propofol and normal saline IV bags,” he said, before detailing a string of orders from April to June which included 255 vials of propofol, or several gallons of the drug.

He also said Murray did not tell him that the address to which he was shipping the orders was not a Los Angeles clinic he ran, as suggested, but was the apartment of his mistress in Santa Monica.

Murray went on trial last week over the singer’s death, accused of administering an overdose of the powerful sedative propofol while trying to help Jackson for insomnia.

Jackson was rehearsing for a series of comeback shows in London when he died on June 25, 2009 at his rented Holmby Hills mansion. Murray’s lawyers claim the star took extra doses of medicine while the doctor was out of the room.

Earlier on Tuesday a cocktail waitress and friend of Murray recounted how she heard mumbling and coughing while on the phone to him at around the time the singer was dying.

Sade Anding testified that Murray called her at 11:51 a.m. on June 25, when she was in Houston and he was at Jackson’s rented mansion, trying to help the star get to sleep.

Five or six minutes into the conversation she realized Murray was no longer answering, and the sound became muffled, as if the telephone was in his pocket.

“I said ‘Hello, Hello,’ and I didn’t hear anything … I pressed the phone to my ear,” she told the court. “I heard mumbling of voices … and I heard coughing.”

She listened to the muffled noises for three or four minutes before hanging up, she said, adding that she tried twice to call him back, but got no answer.

The trial has already heard from paramedics who arrived at Jackson’s home at 12:26 p.m. after receiving a 911 call at 12:21 p.m. — about 20 minutes after the phone call with Anding.

Anding had met Murray in February 2009 at a Houston steakhouse, where the doctor came in as a guest. The pair stayed in touch over the next four months, up to Jackson’s death, the court heard.

She said the pair were friends, although Murray once “playfully” referred to her as his girlfriend.

The court also heard on Tuesday from Nicole Alvarez, who was living with Murray and had a son by him in March 2009 and still lives with him in her apartment in Santa Monica.

Alvarez, a 29-year-old actress who met Murray at a Las Vegas club in 2005, described how he would routinely leave at around 9 p.m. to look after Jackson and return the next morning.

The trial has heard testimony about how the 58-year-old medic would stay at Jackson’s mansion overnight to care for the singer, who was also regularly seeing a dermatologist and was found to be on a cocktail of drugs when he died.

Agence France-Presse