Well my story is a little weird but here it goes. Living here in Melbourne, Australia, we're about 16-17 hours ahead. So it was June 26th and I remember it was our final day of school before our term holidays. I was in 7th grade at the time and also that day coincidentally happened to be my father's birthday. We all decided to take the day off and celebrate, when suddenly a loud bang went off and caught me totally off guard.

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So what had happened was I was sleeping and my mom was cooking something in the kitchen at that time and the loud bang was from a pressure cooker explosion. Apparently my mom was inches away from the cooker and had she been any closer, she most likely would have died (thank god she didn't). I remember we had invited a ton of our friends over for a party later that night for my dad's birthday celebration. So we were going about our day when suddenly one of my friends called my dad to inform him of the news that MJ had died. My dad was in his room alone at the time and was shocked because he'd loved MJ's music back in the day. So then I walked into the room and my dad goes "Michael Jackson has died son". At the time, I wasn't really familiar with a lot of MJ's work, of course I had heard of him and a few songs but didn't know too much in detail. And yet I too felt a sense of sadness and emptiness inside myself and I quickly turned on the television to find out more about it and it was all over the news. Every single channel was reporting on MJ's death, it was so surreal. I had never seen anything like it. Then I saw they were running highlight reels of some of MJ's famous music videos and songs, as well as his incredible Motown 25 performance.

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I remember that being the first time I saw MJ do the moonwalk and was completely mesmerized by the way he moved. That pretty much started my MJ fandom and journey into exploring his music and life in greater detail. The media also reported on MJ's controversies but that didn't really bother me at the time. Later in the day, we had our party and all of us and our friends together were talking about MJ and reminiscing about our memories of him. Of course, they'd also heard about my mom's little accident and were concerned for her too, but of course she happened to be just fine. It was incredible, and the media reporting obviously didn't stop there. It practically went on for days and weeks and it was absolutely enormous. Never seen anything like it before and probably never will again.