The Night James Brown Led Police on a Two-State High-Speed Chase and Claimed They Tried to Kill Him
Updated: Sep 24
On Saturday 24 September 1988, the Godfather of Soul turned up at his office in Augusta, Georgia, noticed his bathroom door was open and decided somebody had some explaining to do. Not long afterwards he was tearing along Interstate 20 with a convoy of police cars behind him, and by the time it was all over his pickup truck was full of bullet holes and he was driving on bare metal rims.
Brown came out of it with a six-year sentence and a prison number. He also came out of it with a story he never stopped telling: that the police hadn't been trying to stop him that day, they'd been trying to kill him. The FBI listened, looked into it and filed the whole thing away. The bureau's file on his complaint stayed under wraps until 2007, a few months after he died.
Quick Answers
• What happened? On 24 September 1988 Brown confronted people at an insurance seminar in the Augusta office complex he owned, with a shotgun to hand, over the use of his private bathroom. When police were called he drove off, starting a chase from Georgia into South Carolina and back.
• How did it end? Officers shot out his tyres, but Brown kept going on the rims for around six miles before his truck ended up in a ditch in Augusta.
• What was he convicted of? Charges including aggravated assault and failing to stop for police. He got six years and served about 15 months in prison plus 10 months on work release.
• What did Brown claim? That officers shot his truck 23 times, hitting the fuel tank, and punched him in the mouth. The FBI opened a civil rights inquiry but nothing came of it.
• Was he ever pardoned? Yes. South Carolina pardoned him in May 2003, and he celebrated by singing God Bless America in front of the board.
The Godfather in Freefall
By 1988 James Brown was 55 and his life was coming apart. This was a man who's widely credited with inventing funk, and who, the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, helped keep Boston calm with a concert that the city's mayor persuaded WGBH to broadcast live so people would stay home and watch it. Brown agreed even though letting the cameras in reportedly clashed with an existing TV deal and cost him around $60,000, according to the Observer-Reporter. Twenty years on, the headlines about him were very different.
Tax problems had eaten into his fortune and his third marriage, to former Solid Gold hair stylist Adrienne Rodriguez, was volatile. In April 1988 he was accused of beating her and shooting at her car while she cowered inside, and was charged with assault with intent to murder. He denied it, saying they'd only argued because he wouldn't take her on a South American tour. The next month he was arrested again on PCP and weapons charges. He pleaded no contest to the PCP charge, and a judge fined him $1,200 and ordered him to put on a benefit concert, according to The Washington Post. It also left him on probation, as music critic Wayne Robins points out, which meant that by September he had an awful lot to lose.
Adrienne filed suit for assault that spring and then dropped it, TIME reported, which became something of a pattern in their marriage. And the irony of it all wasn't lost on anyone who knew his back catalogue. This was the man who'd recorded King Heroin, a spoken-word warning about drugs, back in 1972.
A Shotgun, a Seminar and a Bathroom Door
Brown's own account of what kicked everything off survives in his FBI file, and it's every bit as odd as you'd hope. He told agents he drove to his office that Saturday, saw the bathroom door was open and, thinking there might have been a break-in, went back to his pickup to fetch his shotgun.
It turned out an insurance seminar was being held elsewhere in the building, and some of the people attending had been using his private bathroom. Brown owned the complex and he was furious. By his version, he questioned them about it, left the shotgun propped in the corner of his office in full view, got his keys back and locked the bathroom door. Then he put the gun back in the truck and drove off, per the FBI report.
Other accounts are less forgiving. The authorities said Brown was high on PCP when he walked into the seminar, CBS News reported, and some versions have him carrying a pistol as well as the shotgun. Either way, somebody rang the police.
Six Miles on the Rims
The chase that followed lasted around half an hour, according to the Associated Press. Brown headed along I-20 over the Savannah River into South Carolina, with between 10 and 14 police vehicles eventually involved and speeds of 60 to 85 miles an hour, Best Classic Bands notes.
Augusta is better known to most of the world as the home of the Masters than for high-speed pursuits, but that afternoon its most famous son had police in two states chasing him up and down the interstate.
At one point officers set up a roadblock with two cars parked in a V shape. Brown went round it. Police said he'd tried to ram them. The FBI file records his explanation, that he "drove around the police road block to avoid hitting the police vehicles."
When Brown pulled into a parking lot, officers shot out his front tyres (some reports say three tyres, not two). The police account is that he then tried to run officers down as he pulled away. Brown's account is that officers had already kicked his truck, smashed a window and butted it with a rifle, and that he drove off because he genuinely thought he was about to be killed.
So he kept going. With no tyres left worth the name, he drove on the rims back across the river into Georgia for roughly six miles, until the truck finally lurched into a ditch in Augusta.
Two Versions of One Arrest
The official story is short. Brown was arrested, a blood test found PCP in his system and he was convicted of charges including assault, failing to stop for a police officer, resisting arrest, carrying a pistol and drug possession. His lawyer, Bill Weeks, argued the police had overreacted because of who his client was, and Brown told the court he'd run because he was scared for his life, Alcatraz East records. The jury didn't buy it. On 15 December 1988 he started a six-year sentence (some reports say six and a half), as TIME noted.
Brown's story, which he and Adrienne later laid out for the FBI, is a lot longer. They claimed officers shot the truck 23 times, including the tyres and the fuel tank, and punched him in the mouth hard enough to loosen his dental work. Brown was adamant he'd never been a threat. He later told Al Sharpton, "I never fired at them, or even pointed a gun in their direction", and yet they'd kept shooting.
The fuel tank detail was the one that stuck with him. Bullets in the fuel tank of a truck that was soon throwing sparks off its bare rims isn't a comfortable thought, and it's easy to see why Brown came away convinced the shooting hadn't just been about stopping him.
What the FBI File Actually Says
The file only surfaced because Brown died. In early 2007 the FBI released his 34-page dossier to The Washington Post under a Freedom of Information Act request, and the Post wrote it up that April.
If you're expecting wiretaps and surveillance logs, you'll be disappointed. The file isn't the bureau investigating Brown. It's Brown asking the bureau for help. In 1989, with him already serving his sentence, Adrienne phoned an FBI official to complain that local police were harassing them. She also challenged the blood test, insisting her husband had never taken PCP, had actually campaigned against drugs and might have breathed in someone else's smoke.
Inmate No. 155413
Brown did his time at State Park Correctional Center near Columbia, South Carolina, listed as James J. Brown, No. 155413. When TIME caught up with him, he was getting up at 5:15 every morning to serve breakfast in the cafeteria, in cook's whites finished off with purple wraparound shades and a purple scarf. He ran the chapel choir, where attendance had reportedly doubled since he'd arrived, and on Saturdays Adrienne came in with a hairdryer and a bag of salon products to keep his famous hair in order.
Twenty years earlier Johnny Cash had played for the inmates at Folsom. Now one of the biggest names in American music was an inmate himself.
It wasn't his first time singing behind bars. As a teenager he'd been locked up for breaking into cars, given eight years at 15 (some sources say 16) and served three. Inside, the other boys called him Music Box. He met Bobby Byrd there, and after his release he joined Byrd's gospel group, The Root notes, the start of a partnership that lasted decades. Accounts differ over exactly who sponsored his parole in June 1952, but according to Toppermost it came with one condition: he wasn't to go back to the Augusta area. Thirty-six years later, his most infamous day ended in a ditch there. He wasn't the only Southern prisoner to find his way into music this way either. In Tennessee, the Prisonaires were recording for Sun while still serving their sentences. Brown's big break came when Clint Brantley, Little Richard's manager, took him on.
Outside, fans were pushing for his release. There were Free James Brown badges and T-shirts, the Button Museum notes, and in 1989 a group called Mass Appeal even put out a single called Free James Brown. Brown, never one to waste a promotional opportunity, was allowed to do a handful of phone interviews from prison to plug a cable TV project that was in the works, Robins recalls, having been one of the journalists on the other end of the line.
His second stretch wasn't exactly smooth. In July 1989 he was reportedly moved to tighter security after officials found more than $40,000 in cash and cheques in his cell, and in April 1990 he moved to a work-release programme where, according to one music history timeline, he earned $3.80 an hour counselling young people about drugs. He was paroled on 27 February 1991 after about 15 months in prison and 10 on work release in Aiken, the AP reported.
Straight Back to Work
Brown did what Brown always did. Within months he was headlining a pay-per-view comeback at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, James Brown: Living in America, with MC Hammer, En Vogue and Bell Biv DeVoe among the guests, for about $19.95 a household, American Songwriter recalls.
The trouble followed him, though. Adrienne died in January 1996 in Los Angeles, days after cosmetic surgery. The coroner ruled it an accident caused by heart disease combined with PCP, with Valium, Demerol and morphine also found in her system, UPI reported.
In January 1998 deputies turned up at Brown's home with a judge's order to take him for a mental evaluation and found marijuana and weapons. He was charged with unlawful use of a weapon while under the influence and sent on a 90-day drug programme, Front Page Detectives recounts. That came just after he'd spent a week in a Columbia hospital being treated for painkiller dependency, according to his AP obituary.
Pardoned, With a Song
In May 2003 Brown, now 70, went before South Carolina's Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services with friends, family and state lawmakers speaking up for him. He'd tried and failed two years earlier. This time the seven-member board pardoned him for both the 1988 and 1998 offences, freeing him from all legal consequences of the convictions.
His response was to sing God Bless America on the spot. In a statement afterwards he said, "I hope my pardon shows the youth that America is a beautiful country".
What the pardon didn't do was settle what happened on I-20. As far as the law was concerned, the police version stood. Brown had simply been forgiven for it.
The Man Who Never Got His Mausoleum
Brown died of heart failure in an Atlanta hospital on Christmas Day 2006, aged 73. Given everything that came before, it's almost fitting that death didn't go smoothly either.
While his children, trustees and partner Tomi Rae Hynie argued over his estate, his body sat in a sealed casket in a temperature-controlled room at his Beech Island home, with security guards keeping watch, Today reported. In March 2007 his children paid to have him placed in a crypt at the Beech Island home of his daughter, Deanna Brown Thomas, at a private service led by Al Sharpton. It was supposed to be temporary while a public mausoleum was built, and the family even talked about asking Elvis Presley's family how they'd turned Graceland into a destination, CBS reported.
The estate fight dragged on for 15 years until a settlement in July 2021, Fox News reported, and the mausoleum never happened. As far as has been publicly reported, Brown's still in that crypt on family land.
Beech Island itself never quite knew what to make of him. When NPR visited in 2007, the head of the local historical society remembered the day police shot his tyres out as just one of the ways its most famous resident kept ending up on the news, as NPR found. The 2014 biopic Get On Up, starring Chadwick Boseman, opens with a version of the seminar scene, which tells you how much that one strange afternoon came to define the story of his later years.
So did the police try to kill James Brown? There's no way of knowing now. What we've got is a conviction, a pardon and a 34-page file showing he was telling the same story from the very beginning.
