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The condition of the performer also known as the Hardest Working Man In Show Business "changed too fast," Dr. Marvin Crawford told CNN.
“He was a patient I would never have predicted would have coded,” said Crawford, who signed the death certificate at an Atlanta hospital after the 73-year-old Brown reportedly died of a heart attack and fluid in his lungs on Christmas Day in 2006.
“But he died that night, and I did raise that question: What went wrong in that room?" the doctor told CNN.
It began with a call to a CNN reporter last year from a singer named Jacque Hollander, who worked with Brown as a songwriter in the Eighties and later accused him of raping her.
Hollander produced boxes of documents and tapes collected over three decades, the report says.
The news station conducted interviews with 140 people – including Brown’s widow, son and manager -- for a three-part series.
One of them, Andrew Moses White, who checked Mr. Please Please Please into the hospital just before he died, told CNN that he took a vial of the singer’s blood from an IV tube in case authorities chose to investigate.
Questions also are raised in the CNN report about the death of Brown’s third wife, Adrienne, in 1996 while recovering from plastic surgery.
CNN says its reporters traveled through nine states, reviewed tens of thousands of pages of police and court records and analyzed more than 1,300 pages of text messages from Hollander's iPhone.
It also had forensic testing done on a woman's shoe found in a mysterious black duffel bag.
SEE: CNN investigation raises questions about the deaths of James Brown and his third wife, Adrienne
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