The Godfather of Soul is back—or at least investigations into his death may be.
Iconic singer, songwriter, dancer, musician, record producer and bandleader James Brown died reportedly of heart failure in 2006 at age 73. But the Fulton County district attorney is taking another look at his death after a woman surfaced with a surprising claim, WBS-TV2 reported.
The Associated Press is reporting that a woman named Jacque Hollander contacted Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard’s office to request a meeting, claiming Brown’s death was caused by another person, according to the prosecutor’s spokesman Chris Hopper. Howard met with Hollander on Wednesday and accepted a bin of materials she said related to Brown’s death.
Howard will look at the materials Hollander brought and will decide whether to open an investigation, Hopper said.
Last year CNN published a three-part investigative series that raised questions about Brown’s death. According to the series, 13 people, including Brown’s manager, his son Daryl, his last wife, a man who claimed to have taken a vial of Brown’s blood from the hospital and Hollander wanted either an autopsy or a criminal investigation. Hollander, who was a circus singer, first called CNN in 2017 alleging that Brown had been murdered.
CNN said it was Hollander who met with the district attorney on Wednesday and that she’d tried to arrange the meeting in 2019, but she says no one called her back. Howard agreed to meet with her in January after CNN asked the prosecutor’s spokesman about her calls. He even allowed a CNN reporter and a camera crew into the conference room during the interview.
It’s worth mentioning that in 2017, Marvin Crawford, the doctor who signed that certificate, said in an interview with CNN that he’d always wondered what exactly caused his heart failure and whether Brown’s sudden death had been caused by a toxic substance.
“He changed too fast,” Crawford said. “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?”
But recently Crawford spoke to TMZ reporters denying that he ever said that and saying emphatically that Brown wasn’t murdered and that the Fulton County D.A.’s Office is wasting its time in looking into Hollander’s claims and so-called evidence.
About his previous comments raising questions about Brown’s death, he said, “CNN said I said that but I didn’t say that about the drugs.”