(Lewis Brown) Ex-Basketball Prodigy Dies on Streets Where He Lived

[alp227]

LOS ANGELES — Lewis Brown, a high school and college basketball prodigy who spent the past 10 years living on a sidewalk in Hollywood, seemed on the verge of a second chance. He had scraped enough money together to get a California identification card so he could fly to visit a sister in New York who had thought him dead. Friends said that he would finally get off the street.

That was on Tuesday. But Wednesday, around 6 a.m., Mr. Brown, breathless and frantic, was pleading for someone to call an ambulance. By the time help arrived, Mr. Brown — 300 pounds, 6 feet 11 inches — was lying on the ground. A half-hour of efforts by four paramedics — as his neighborhood friends shouted: “Come on, Big Lew! You can make it” — could not save him.

For Mr. Brown — a star high school center who once seemed destined for a spot in the N.B.A. — all that was left on Thursday was a Staples shopping cart carrying a few of his possessions: a pair of sneakers, a blanket, a laminated copy of a New York Times article from this year that detailed his sad story of decline, bitterness, drug arrests and missed opportunities. The remainder of his belongings — a mattress, some tattered clothes — had been put into a Dumpster.

Throughout the day, people who had known Mr. Brown, 56, from the neighborhood, where he would wash windows and talk about his lost basketball past in Compton and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, stopped as they learned of his death. Tony Chauncey, a Time Warner Cable worker, said he had seen him last month and told him that he was going to a hospital to be checked for a reappearance of cancer.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/us/lewis-brown-faded-basketball-prodigy-dies-homeless.html

In May, the NY Times profiled Brown's homeless life in "A Former Basketball Prodigy, Bereft of All but His Memories".