When James Brown passed away at 73 on Christmas Day 2006, no autopsy was performed given his advanced age and intermittent health battles but a new report suggests foul play was involved and Brown, along with his third wife was murdered by a family member.
In a new investigation by CNN, investigators spoke with a number of people who knew Brown and say they believe foul play was involved and an autopsy should be performed on Brown while other believed his third wife Adrienne Brown was murdered despite no signs.
These skeptics include Dr. Marvin Crawford, who signed Brown’s death certificate at an Atlanta hospital in 2006. In an exclusive interview with CNN, Crawford said he never believed that Brown died of natural causes.
“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?”
Officially, the Godfather of Soul died of a heart attack and fluid in the lungs at age 73 in the early hours of Christmas Day 2006. Twelve years later, his manager, his widow, his son, and several friends and associates all tell CNN there are serious questions about Brown’s death that can only be answered by forensic investigators.
Based on interviews with nearly 140 people, the three-part series also examines the 1996 death of Adrienne Brown, James Brown’s third wife. Although authorities in California found no sign of foul play when Adrienne Brown died while recovering from plastic surgery, a friend always believed she was murdered.
The report goes on to say in the case of James Brown, a doctor is accused of issuing a fatal dose and Brown’s daughter Jemma declined to do an autopsy on his body.
In 2017, the retired police detective who investigated Adrienne Brown’s death showed CNN the pages of a notebook that he said a confidential informant had given him in 2001. In those pages, which the detective says he read for the first time after CNN contacted him in 2017, the informant alleges that a doctor confessed to murdering Adrienne Brown with a fatal drug overdose. CNN found and interviewed the doctor, who denied the allegations.The police did not open a criminal investigation when James Brown died in 2006. But his friend Andre White and others have alleged that Brown was murdered.In the hours after Brown’s death, Dr. Crawford says he recommended an autopsy. But Brown’s daughter Yamma Brown declined the autopsy. When questioned about that decision by CNN, she did not offer an explanation.