Getting the exact timestamp of a Stack Exchange chat message

I'm currently working on (yet another) chat library, and I've been mostly successful gleaning data from the existing libraries, except for one tidbit:
Is there a way to get the exact timestamp of an arbitrary message?

/history only contains timestamps like "Sat 3:42 PM" (which require parsing, ugh), while the events websocket, the /events endpoint, and even /new return an exact timestamp. I've looked through master-chat.js to no avail.
Is there a way to do this for an arbitrary message given an id, or is inexact parsing needed?

Assuming you know the roomId of the room the message was posted you can do the following:

1. POST to /chats/<roomId>/events passing the following information:

   fkey: "<your fkey>"
   msgCount: 2
   mode: "Messages"
   before: <msgId> + 1
   

2. Grab the .events array from the JSON response.

3. Search for the object with these properties: event_type: 1 (1 means message was posted) and message_id: <msgId>.

Then, time_stamp is what you need (Unix epoch time).