On a Tuesday evening last May, federal inmate Bianca Bowler watched as one-legged Roxanna Brown, wearing a shirt and towel and supporting herself with a plastic chair, inched along toward the women's shower room at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac. Arrested in connection with antiquities smuggling and wire fraud, and being detained for transfer from Seattle to face a judge in Los Angeles, the petite, 5-foot-1 Brown had been suffering from nausea and diarrhea for most of four days, and badly needed to bathe.
Fred Leo Brown
Brown on a motorcycle in New York in 1968.
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Brown slid the chair like a walker as she moved across the floor of the hulking eight-story prison. Then, as inmates remember it, she stumbled and fell in front of a corrections officer.
"The officer watched this happen and simply gave her dirty looks," Bowler recalls. She and another inmate came to Brown's aid, Bowler says, lifting the respected scholar and dragging her into the showers. They were worried about her survival, Bowler says.
At least someone was. Brown was brought into the detention center on one leg and five days later carried out foot first. The American-born, Bangkok-based museum director had survived Vietnam as a war correspondent, hanging with the likes of David Halberstam and Ted Koppel, and had been close to death after losing her right leg in the wake of a motorbike crash in Thailand in the '80s. But it was from a modern American prison that the globetrotting Southeast Asian art historian would emerge in a body bag on May 14, 2008. Twelve days earlier, she had turned 62.
In dire need of emergency care, Brown died about seven hours after inmates say she collapsed in front of the officer. Inmates say they, not the detention center staff, went to her aid in her final hours—they had to support Brown's head the way you "support an infant's," Bowler says, to feed her antacid. Federal officials dispute the prisoners' versions, and contend that Brown, who was apparently the first inmate known to die unexpectedly at the 10-year-old detention center, had showed initial signs only of a minor gastrointestinal "bug."
But all agree that the adventurous woman who skirted death in the Third World was killed in the First World by a perforated gastric ulcer known as peritonitis. "It's surprising," says Brown family attorney Tim Ford of Seattle, "that anyone in a country with such access to medical care dies from an ulcer."
The King County Medical Examiner ruled the death "natural." Ford calls it negligence.
"They [detention staff] did basically nothing to help her," he says. In July, Ford filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Seattle against the Federal Bureau of Prisons for alleged violation of Brown's civil rights. The suit asks for unspecified money damages on behalf of Brown's son, Jaime Ngerntongdee of Bangkok.
In documents filed in the case last week, retired King County Medical Examiner Donald Reay, now a legal consultant, says his review of Brown's autopsy report indicates her peritonitis existed and began progressing "probably 24 to 36 hours, no less than 12 hours" before her death. "She likely would have appeared very ill and in great pain," with intestinal fluids leaking through a perforation into her abdomen, "and she probably would have been unable to tolerate palpation [exam by touch] of her abdomen during this time." Such a condition required emergency treatment, Reay concludes.
Brown's family thinks she shouldn't have been in the 500-bed detention center south of SeaTac Airport in the first place. Federal prosecutors "obviously took something to a grand jury that was sitting around on a Friday afternoon, and returned the world's vaguest indictment," says attorney Ford. The one-paragraph document issued by a Los Angeles grand jury accuses her of aiding and abetting a scheme to defraud the IRS. It claims she allowed her electronic signature to be used on appraisal forms with inflated, tax-deductible valuations. The continuing probe, centered in Los Angeles, involves a group of antiquities dealers and wealthy donors who trade in ancient ceramics, stone, glass, and brass.
Brown had cooperated with federal agents as they developed their case over five years, helping them identify suspects and providing information. Court records show she opposed removing valued objects from their homeland, and said that if her signature had shown up on fraudulent documents, it was without her knowledge.
But she became a suspect when additional evidence surfaced early this year. In a series of January raids, agents found an e-mail she'd sent to a gallery operator suspected of defrauding the IRS. He'd asked her to sign and fax blank appraisal forms he could fill out later. In her message, Brown said she was "delighted to be [the gallery operator's] partner in this."
That didn't necessarily mean she was a knowing partner in crime, says her family. But on May 9 agents swooped into her Seattle hotel room, where she was waiting to speak the next day at a University of Washington academic conference. Brown made contradictory statements to agents, they say, though she held to her story that others misused her signature, according to a federal court affidavit.
Once the government's confidant, Brown became—and remains—the only person charged in the fraud probe, says Thom Mrozek, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles. Without her, the feds appear to have a weaker case against other suspects. In court, prosecutors called her death "tragic."
