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Fulton County district attorney taking another look into James Brown’s death

ATLANTA — James Brown died in 2006. But the Fulton County district attorney is taking another look at his death after a woman surfaced with a surprising claim.

Brown, known as the Godfather of Soul, was 73 when he died of heart failure on Christmas day in 2006 in Atlanta, less than two days after being hospitalized for treatment of pneumonia.

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 series of investigative series that raised questions about Brown’s death. It cited 13 people who wanted either an autopsy or a criminal investigation. Those people included 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 Jacque Hollander, the circus singer who first called CNN in 2017 to allege that Brown had been murdered.

CNN said it was Hollander who met with the district attorney on Wednesday. She’d tried to arrange the meeting in 2019, but she says no one called her back. In January, after CNN asked the prosecutor’s spokesman about her calls, Howard said he was willing to meet with her. And he agreed to let a CNN reporter and a camera crew into the conference room during the interview.

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