The Winding Road and Mysterious End of Chris Brown

There are a number of pretty amazing hooks to the story of Chris Brown, the former all-star San Francisco Giants third-baseman who quit baseball after a few seasons amid a string of dubious injuries, did three tours in Iraq driving a truck for Halliburton and died the day after Christmas 2006, from burns received in a mysterious fire in an abandoned Houston home.

Got all that?

His story, as S.F. Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius points out, really demonstrates how silly it is to think any life can be summed up in a single story. Even boiling his life down to its newsiest elements, there's still much to wade through.

Nevius' piece also nicely sums up one of the great ironies in his story: as a player, Brown was notoriously injury-prone -- but not in an Aaron Rowand "I ran through five walls before I got out of bed this morning" kind of way. Brown missed games with a "bruised tooth," or once because he said he slept on his eye wrong.

This is the same guy who dodged bullets hauling for Halliburton, and even drove in the notorious 2004 attack in which XXX was kidnapped.

After working three contracts with Halliburton, Brown returned home for good, but the few stories on his later life imply things weren't quite right when he returned; he split with his longtime wife after coming back from the war.

It does sound like someone returning from war, struggling to cope with PTSD. Answers, though, would be hard to come by, after his tragic death in a strange fire in an abandoned house. Houston police haven't been able to determine whether the fire was arson or accidental, and there are questions about why Brown was in the house in the first place.

Like many of the stories I've come across in reporting this contractors project, there are a handful of fascinating threads to unravel, even though it's not clear any of them lead to a clear conclusion.