by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2008 | Asia
“Her questionable death in federal custody means we may never know,” writes Rick Anderson in a long article in the Seattle Weekly. “The American-born, Bangkok-based museum director” died in prison of an untreated ulcer:
[A] 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 … Once the government’s confidant, Brown became—and remains—the only person charged in the fraud probe.
She’d had quite a life:
[Raised] on an Illinois chicken farm … A high-school cheerleader and senior class president, she went on to study journalism at Columbia University in New York and graduate with a degree in philosophy. At 21 she rode cross-country on a motorcycle to California, from where in 1968 she headed to Australia, then to Vietnam to see her brother … Bilingual and a budding writer, Roxanna wrangled freelance reporting jobs during the Vietnam War, working at times for the Associated Press … Subsequently, she produced the first of seven books she would author or co-write, and edited an arts magazine in Hong Kong. But while living there, she became addicted to opium, and was eventually arrested, detained, and ordered to leave the country … She ended up marrying a former Buddhist monk, with whom she had a son. In 1982, when Brown was 36, she was riding her silver and red motorbike on the congested Bangkok streets when she was hit by a truck, eventually losing her leg … Roxanna’s marriage ended, but she trudged on, a one-legged single mom who, upon returning to Bangkok, ran a small bar and worked part-time as a ceramics teacher … After 2000, she returned to the U.S., where, aided by friends, she enrolled in grad school at UCLA. She left with a doctorate in 2004, at age 58, having become an expert on the recovery of ceramics from historic shipwrecks. Brown regularly produced scholarly articles on Asian plate and vase production around the 15th century, and was best known for her book The Ceramics of South-East Asia: Their Dating and Identification.
