Flex - Convert a SQLServer Datetime into ActionScript Date

In my Appointments table, I have a field called apptStartTime, which stored in sqlserver as a datetime. I had to figure out how to fetch the date in a format that the ActionScript Date object could use.  So in my sql statement, I had to convert the date like this:

select
convert(varchar(20),apptStartTime,109) + ' ' +   right(convert(varchar(26),apptStartTime,109),2)
from Appointments

In my application I was actually pulling the data in xml format and the apptStartTime was an attribute of a 'data' element.
Once the data reached the client, I would have thought that I could just pass the value from the xml attribute into the Date constructor like this...

var myDate:Date = new Date(data.@apptStartTime);

BUT THIS DIDN'T WORK!
So I created a function to parse the date, like this:

private function parseDate(str:String):Date{
    try{
            return new Date(str);
    }catch(e:Error){
               
    }
    return null;
}

So passing my data from the xml into the parseData() function did the trick:

var myDate:Date = parseDate(data.@apptStartTime);