The body found encased in concrete inside a refrigerator at a Northeast D.C. apartment building has been identified as a 44-year-old woman and housing advocate.
Chandra Brown was remembered as a talented writer and poet.
“That's my baby. My baby's gone,” said Sheila Brown, the mother of Chandra Brown.
She was overwhelmed by emotion as she spoke about her daughter.
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“She was the kid that made me the mother that I am,” she said.
Sheila Brown described her daughter as a spark of light who, as a young child, showed a talent for writing and poetry, which became a lifelong passion.
“There’s books of her work that is all around the United States that we don't have access to that brilliant writing,” she said.
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Chandra Brown graduated from Dunbar High School in the District, trained as a nurse assistant and had three children. But things began to get difficult for her, and within a few years, her children went to live with family in North Carolina, and Chandra began living unhoused in the District.
“Part of where she ended up where she was was she always wanted to help the homeless people,” Sheila Brown said. “She felt there was something that drew her to them. I'm not sure what turned in her life.”
She believes it was her daughter's compassion that led to a moment in 2021 captured by TV cameras and memorialized in a tweet at the dedication of a new park in Franklin Square downtown, where there had formerly been a homeless encampment.
Chandra Brown stood up and gave the middle finger to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. In an interview that day with the publication Street Sense, she expressed frustration with the mayor's administration.
Chandra Brown's path to 4300 Brook St. NE where her body was found Oct. 18 is not clear. Neighbors told News4 the refrigerator that held her remains, which were encased in concrete, came from a third floor apartment in the mostly empty building. Workers found the refrigerator in a dumpster being used to hold construction debris.
Sheila Brown, who lives in North Carolina, says she and her daughter spoke by phone regularly until May of 2023, then nothing.
The exact cause of Brown's death has yet to be determined by the D.C. Medical Examiner.
