As her husband, Danny, lay unmoving on the floor near her, Julie Gans stopped talking to the 911 operator and patiently explained the situation.
"OK, move away ... I'm trying to see if I can hear Daddy breathing," she said.
At least one of Danny and Julie Gans' three children, 19-year-old Andrew, and the family dog were in the room as Julie Gans followed the instructions of the 911 operator, a tape of the emergency call reveals.
It was Andrew, according to the recording, who helped Julie Gans lift the popular Las Vegas entertainer off of the bed and onto the master bedroom floor, so she could perform the CPR that the operator would talk her through.
On the tape, Julie Gans can be heard counting aloud the chest compressions she was performing on her husband. At one point, while nearly breathless from the CPR, she calmly told someone, "Move the dog back."
The 3:44 a.m. 911 call released Thursday by Henderson police gives the public its first real sense of what happened in the early morning hours of May 1, the day the 52-year-old Gans died from what the coroner later ruled was acute hydromorphone toxicity because of chronic pain syndrome.
The death, involving a powerful painkiller commonly known as Dilaudid, was ruled accidental by Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy.
In a Henderson police report released Thursday, Detective Chad Mitchell wrote that during an interview with Julie Gans, she told him that, at the request of police, "she had gathered and placed all of her husband's medications on a table located directly outside of the master bedroom doorway so that they could be examined."
Mitchell wrote that Henderson Crime Scene Analyst Jennie Ayers "conducted a count down of all" of Gans' medications and "noted nothing remarkable."
"The exact number of pills she located and counted will be reflected in her crime scene report," Mitchell wrote.
Citing privacy issues, Henderson police refused Thursday to release Ayers' report.
Ayers declined a request for an interview Thursday. Attempts to reach Julie Gans were unsuccessful.
A Henderson physician who says he treated Gans for pain told the Review-Journal earlier this month that the first and last time he wrote Gans a prescription for Dilaudid was about five years ago.
Dr. Michael Fishell told the Review-Journal it is conceivable that Gans could have started "really suffering" from pain in a chronic bad shoulder and found the leftover medication from the old prescription "in the back of the medicine cabinet" and taken some of it.
Mitchell's report reiterates what largely has been reported already.
Gans had come home at about 3 p.m. on April 30 after playing golf. After he had a shower, his wife told him that dinner would be ready about 4:30 p.m.
But he fell into a deep, snoring sleep. Julie Gans sent Andrew to wake him for dinner. "Andrew told his mother that his father was asleep and it was decided not to wake him," the report states.
When Julie Gans joined her husband in the bedroom at about 10 p.m., her husband was still snoring.
At 3:40 a.m, Julie Gans told Mitchell, she suddenly awoke when she no longer heard the snoring. When she realized he was not responsive and could not tell whether he was breathing, she dialed 911.
"I can't seem to wake him up," she told the 911 operator.
After Julie Gans' call for help, Henderson police arrived at Gans home in the Roma Hills gated community off of Horizon Ridge Parkway. Neither police nor paramedics were able to get Gans breathing.
Mitchell, who declined to be interviewed Thursday, said that when Coroner Michael Murphy and coroner's investigator Dan Daniels arrived, they noted that Gans' face was "swollen and red."
"Investigator Daniels found nothing during his examination that suggested foul play was involved in Gans' death," Mitchell wrote.
Contact reporter Paul Harasim at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.
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