SECOND LOOK?
DA mulls slay probe in Brown’s ’06 death
AClaims that James Brown was murdered have haunted the Godfather of Soul’s legacy for years, and now an Atlanta prosecutor is considering an official probe to put them to rest.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard met Wednesday with a woman named Jacque Hollander to discuss her suspicions Brown was the victim of a homicide, DA spokesman Chris Hopper confirmed.
Howard accepted a bin of materials from Hollander and will review them before determining whether the case warrants a full-scale criminal investigation, the spokesman said.
Brown died on Christmas day 2006 at the age of 73, less than two days after he was hospitalized for treatment of suspected pneumonia.
His official cause of death was reported as congestive heart failure and fluid in the lungs, but the physician who signed his death certificate, Dr. Marvin Crawford, later told CNN he had unanswered questions.
“He changed too fast,” Dr. Crawford told CNN in a report published last year. “He was a patient I would never have predicted would have coded. But he died that night, and I did raise that question: What went wrong in that room?”
Brown’s daughter Yamma Brown declined an autopsy without giving an explanation as to why, CNN said.
Hollander, 63, is a circus singer who met Brown as a child and later collaborated with him before he allegedly raped her at gunpoint in 1988, she told CNN in a series of interviews.
She reportedly believes Brown was planning to move to New York and shake up his legal team shortly before his death — and the change may have provided a motive, considering access to the singer’s fortune was at stake.
Andre Moses White, the friend who helped Brown check into the hospital, reportedly told CNN that shortly before the soul sensation flatlined, a nurse said he “was visited by a male stranger she didn’t recognize.”
After that visit, the nurse reportedly told White that Brown’s vital signs “rapidly declined,” according to CNN.
A mysterious “residue” was later detected in Brown’s IV tube, CNN reported, saying it couldn’t independently verify the claim.
Dr. Crawford told CNN he never went to authorities because he believed Brown had willingly taken drugs in his hospital room.
White, meanwhile, reportedly confiscated a vial of Brown’s blood from a nurse in the hope of proving his friend had been murdered.
CNN was allowed to sit in on the meeting with prosecutors Wednesday and said Howard promised to have his investigators interview possible witnesses and weigh the alleged evidence before making a decision on whether to launch a full-scale investigation.
“He was very kind,” Hollander said of Howard outside the courthouse Wednesday afternoon. “I think he will get to the bottom of this.”