CNN is reporting ….and it is an ever thickening plot
Days after an Atlanta prosecutor said he would consider opening a formal investigation into James Brown’s death, Brown’s longtime attorney said he would have no objection if authorities wanted to examine the singer’s remains.
“Exhume him,” Buddy Dallas said in a phone interview on February 24, his first comments to CNN since news of a potential investigation surfaced. “I don’t have any feeling about it one way or another.”
Dallas has said little to the media since CNN published my investigative series on Brown in early 2019. He declined to answer questions for that series, citing advice from his own attorney.
But on the morning of February 24, he texted me a link to a February 14 story from the celebrity news website TMZ that said Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard Jr. was wasting his time examining Brown’s death. Dallas followed up with a phone call. I asked what he thought about the fact that more than a dozen people had called for an autopsy or a criminal investigation.
“If he’s got something to base it on,” Dallas said of the prosecutor, “let him exhume the body.”
Many late celebrities have public gravesites where fans can pay their respects. But with the Godfather of Soul, nothing is that simple. After his death in Atlanta in 2006, Brown’s remains were apparently placed in a crypt outside the home of his daughter Deanna Brown Thomas near Aiken, South Carolina.
In 2010, another daughter alleged that the crypt was empty. In 2018, when I asked Deanna Brown Thomas about this claim, she neither confirmed nor denied it. In 2019, I asked Russell Bauknight, the executor of Brown’s estate, where Brown’s body was. “No comment,” he replied. In late February, I asked Dallas where the body was. He said that as far as he knew, it was still on the daughter’s property.
But it was obvious why Dallas had contacted me. He saw the TMZ story as confirmation that James Brown wasn’t murdered. A crucial part of my investigative series was an interview with Marvin Crawford, the doctor who signed Brown’s death certificate.
