Indicted museum director found dead at WA federal prison

A Thailand museum director who was indicted as part of a federal investigation into looted antiquities died Wednesday at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, apparently following a heart attack.

Roxanna Brown, a 62-year-old U.S. citizen, passed away sometime around 2:30 Wednesday morning. Prison spokeswoman Maggie Ogden said an autopsy was planned.

Brown, director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University in Thailand, was arrested Friday while visiting a cousin in Seattle. She also had been scheduled to speak at the University of Washington over the weekend.

She was charged with wire fraud, allegedly for allowing art collectors to use her electronic signature to overstate the value of items they donated to several Southern California museums. The collectors then claimed fraudulent tax deductions, investigators said.

Brown was too ill to appear in federal court in Seattle on Monday but did appear briefly Tuesday. Another hearing on her transfer to Los Angeles, where the indictment was returned, had been set for Wednesday.

She was the first person arrested in an ongoing probe into looted artifacts. Federal agents raided several Southern California museums and a Los Angeles gallery in January, searching for artifacts from Thailand's Ban Chiang archaeological site, one of the most important prehistoric settlements ever discovered in Southeast Asia.

An affidavit filed in the case said the gallery's owners, Jonathan and Cari Markell, used Brown's electronic signature several times to falsify appraisal forms. In one case, an appraisal for items to be donated to the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena indicated Brown had inspected the items. The Markells, who have not been charged, previously declined to comment about the investigation to The Associated Press.

Brown's brother, Fred Leo Brown of Chicago, said his sister maintained her innocence. He said that although a cause of death had not been determined, he had been told it was apparently a heart attack, which he suggested was the result of stress from the arrest.

"She wasn't in good health to begin with, but they definitely brought on the heart attack," he said.

Brown said his sister became interested in Southeast Asian art after visiting him in 1968 in Australia, where he was recovering from a Vietnam war wound. With a journalism degree from Columbia University, she soon made her way to Saigon, where she befriended many people in the international press corps, he said, and she traveled around Vietnam in the early 1970s visiting kiln sites where pottery was made.

She earned a master's degree in Asian art at Oxford University and lost one leg in an accident in Bangkok in 1980, he said.

She is survived by one son, who lives in Bangkok, he said.

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Associated Press writer Greg Risling contributed from Los Angeles.