An Alabama inmate with "serious mental and psychiatric needs" was placed in a concrete drunk tank known as "the freezer" before he later died from hypothermia in a death now ruled a homicide, state records show.
Anthony Don Mitchell died Jan. 26, 2023, while in the custody of the Walker County Sheriff’s Department after "spending fourteen days incarcerated under horrendous conditions" at the Walker County Jail, according to an amended complaint filed in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
The jail is in the city of Jasper about 40 miles northwest of Birmingham.
According to the 53-page suit filed by his mother, Margaret Mitchell, corrections officers at the jail purposely exposed her 33-year-old son to freezing temperatures in the tank over a 24-period.