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James Brown performs at the Live 8 Edinburgh concert July 6, 2005 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The singer died the next year.
Atlanta CNN –
Three years ago, in the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, a prosecutor stood at a table cataloging items in evidence bags.
“Here’s the shoe,” Assistant District Attorney Michael Sprinkel said in internal video of the inventory session, obtained as part of a disclosure request by CNN. “This is the untested shoe believed to have been worn in the hospital room on the night of James Brown’s death.”
The items were dropped off by Jacque Hollander, a woman who said she could prove the “Godfather of Soul” was murdered in an Atlanta hospital in 2006. More than a dozen people who knew Brown have called for an autopsy or criminal investigation.
“He was murdered,” Brown’s manager Frank Copsidas said in an interview in 2022. “That’s just my interpretation, plain and simple. Someone wanted him dead.”
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After Hollander visited the district attorney’s office in 2020, prosecutors agreed to review her story.
However, the investigation was dropped in 2021 after an assistant district attorney found there was “insufficient basis to open a grand jury investigation” and authorities had taken no action regarding Brown’s death.
And then something strange happened to the items in the prosecution’s evidence bags. They disappeared.
District Attorney Fani Willis has not publicly admitted to the disappearance. She has also given no outward indication that she is trying to find out what happened. Several CNN inquiries on the subject went unanswered. The missing items in the evidence bags have become another of the many mysteries that still surround Brown’s life and death.
In January, Hollander sued Willis in Fulton County Superior Court. The lawsuit alleges numerous documents related to the James Brown investigation and “all property and evidence presented to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in connection with this investigation, received, preserved or.” possessed” were required.
The prosecutor’s office was strangely silent about the missing items, and that silence continued after the lawsuit was filed. A defense attorney reported that he served William McCombs, the DA’s liaison for justice, on January 17 with a subpoena and a complaint. In civil litigation, a response is required within 30 days.
However, there was no response from the prosecutor. months passed. On April 3, Hollander’s attorneys filed a motion for a default judgment.
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference on August 29, 2022.
Finally, on May 8, the prosecutor replied. Willis’ attorneys begged Judge Paige Reese Whitaker not to enter a default judgment for Hollander, blaming “excusable omission” for the delay in responding.
Assistant District Attorney Dexter Bond vowed in an affidavit that after service, McCombs “did not personally serve the subpoena and complaint to the appropriate team member, but emailed it.” Consequently, the email was missed and it was not delivered in a timely manner submitted an answer.”
CNN emailed McCombs to inquire about these claims. McCombs wrote back asking for a copy of Bond’s affidavit, which the reporter sent. CNN has since reached out to McCombs, who has not responded again.
Bond’s affidavit did not address the issue of the missing items. A staffer who processes evidence for the prosecutor’s office claimed in 2022 that they were all sent to Hollander at her request, but Hollander said she never received them.
On March 14, 2022, she received a box from the prosecutor’s office, but it was significantly smaller and lighter than the green plastic container she had given her. The box contained few or no items from the evidence bags. A black nylon bag that had once been full of items was returned empty. The missing items in the green plastic bin included a calendar book, a handwritten note, and the black stiletto shoe that the prosecutor mentioned in the video.
After the items went missing, CNN filed a request for the release of all documents related to their chain of custody. But Don Geary, the prosecutor’s legal counsel at the time, said there were no documents other than Hollander’s proof of ownership.
“Aren’t people at the DA’s office required to sign a protocol when they handle evidence?” A reporter wrote to Geary. “Is there no system for the preservation of evidence?”
“One would expect,” Geary wrote back, “however there are no other documents regarding the property.”
About two months after Hollander received the package, Deputy Chief of Evidence William Chris Clark emailed a colleague about the situation. This email was received from CNN via an Open Records request.
Melissa Golden/Redux for CNN
Jacque Hollander, here with the Carson & Barnes Circus at a tour stop in 2018.
“I am aware that Ms. Hollander says that other items were turned over to the Attorney General’s office (long before our time), but none of these items were in the container and a search of the premises revealed no other items related to the case stand,” Clark wrote. “(They might show up later, once we’ve done a full inventory at the warehouse.) This was after the items were shipped to them.”
Legal Counsel Don Geary has since left the Fulton District Attorney’s office. He did not answer a call asking for comment on this story. CNN emailed Assistant District Attorney Jeff DiSantis, the prosecutor’s spokesman, asking about Hollander’s lawsuit and the missing potential evidence. DiSantis didn’t answer.
CNN also emailed Willis, but received no response. Willis has made national headlines with her ongoing criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump.
In a recent phone interview with CNN, Hollander asked Willis to account for the missing items in the evidence bags.
“She should have started an investigation,” Hollander said. “The FBI should start an investigation. Evidence just doesn’t go out of the district attorney’s office.”