More About Anna Brown

In an earilier post, we told you about Ms. Anna Brown. She was a 29 year old woman from St. Louis who was homeless. Brown went to St. Mary's medical center for help with an ankle injury.

The medical center treated her as if she was on drugs and they called the police on her for simply sitting in a wheelchair in their waiting room. The police arrested her and as you can see from the survielance video included in our post, the police appear to drag her from the police car, and they lay her on the concrete floor in a cell between two unoccupied beds. Ms. Brown was dead within 15 minutes.

The Bogus Barrister now has additional information about Anna Brown and the conditions under which she was homeless.

She and her two children lost their home to a tornado. After that, Ms. Brown lost her job. Because of poverty, the government took her children and placed them with her mother.

This situation was directly caused by our economic depression that the United States is in. Let's call this for what it really is. We are not in any "recession." Anna Brown was by all accounts, not a lazy person. She is what sadly is a growing population of those who are willing to work, but cannot find any emoloyment that pays enough to support their families. The working poor don't even qualify for public assistance. Everything in this country is getting more expensive but nobody is earning more. People who are working these days, cannot afford the ridiculously high rents.

I realize that this is a crime blog and this may seem like a political commentary to some readers, and to an extent it is. However, anybody who dies at a hospital because of the staff's perceieved economic status of a patient is a crime. This looks to me like they wanted her gone because they knew she was homeless and did not have the ability to pay. That is shameful.

Now the police department justifiably so, has come under fire for the way they mishandled this case. The video speaks for itself. The officers couldn't even be bothered to lay this woman on a bed, two feet away. They threw her on the floor. They saw her as less than human. They stereotyped her as a drunk just because she was homeless. You can even hear one of the officers telling the medical examiner that the hospital staff thought she was drunk. But surely, the hospital would have known otherwise from a blood sample or even the lack of the smell of alcohol.

The police department point the finger of guilty back at St. Mary's as it was the medical professionals who determined that Ms. Brown was healthy enough to be arrested and thrown in jail and left there on that concrete floor in the cell.

The medical staff tried to pass the buck by claiming there was no detection of blood clots. They assert that she did not appear to have any, but yet there is no explanation as to why she recieved no treatment for the clearly visible swelling in her ankle or the pain that went with it. Ms. Brown as seen by the hospital staff. They did an ultrasound on both her legs in fact.

Nevertheless, the hospital did not take her pain complaints seriously and the police department was quite willing to arrest her for "trespassing." You wouldn't think that it would even be legally possible to be arrested for trespassing at a public place like a hospital especially when you had a legitimate reason to be there as a patient.


Richmond Heights Mayor James Beck is expected to discuss the tragedy at a city council meeting tonight. You can express your concerns about the case directly to the Mayor at his website.