Early this year, in the small mining town of Jasper, a man died of hypothermia after two weeks in county jail, launching national headlines and an investigation by the FBI.

But it’s not the first time that an inmate died in Walker County Jail or a family alleged medical neglect.

A litany of recent lawsuits against the jail claim injury and medical neglect, and include tales of inmates left to die from blood poisoning, pneumonia or for want of basic medical care. Inmates allege they were jailed for petty crimes, such as stealing $40. Some say they were locked up for months or longer.

“When I came in, we had people who (had) been in the county jail for three, four, five, six years,” said Sheriff Nick Smith about inmates stuck in jail while awaiting trial.

In fact, the Walker County Jail has a troubled legal history going back decades, so much so that in 1995, a federal judge ordered the sheriff to transform the jail after a class action lawsuit over unsafe conditions. But continued complaints and even a bizarre escape suggest maybe not much has improved. The complaints, the FBI investigation, the recent deaths, all seem to raise a lingering question:

What is wrong with the Walker County jail?

Sheriff Smith, who was elected in 2018, says he’s working to turn it around. “There’s a lot of problems that I inherited that we’ve worked extremely hard to fix,” Smith told AL.com. “On top of trying to fight and combat new problems.”

Unsafe conditions

Earlier this year, the mother of Anthony Mitchell, 33, sued, saying her son froze to death while jail staff failed to call for help for hours. But long before that case, numerous lawsuits alleged that people faced substandard and violent conditions in the Walker County Jail.

Some lawsuits alleged sewer water flooded their cells, that jailers held people for days in solitary confinement as punishment or that three to four people stayed in a single cell, sometimes sleeping on the floor without mats.

The complaints speak of violent punishment by guards, unchecked fights among inmates and serious injuries left untreated.

In 2020, two inmates filed separate lawsuits against the jail saying they were assaulted and placed in a restraint chair by guards. One of the inmates, Jaiden Gilbert, said he was left strapped in the chair in the cold, outdoors, as punishment for standing up for another inmate to a guard. His lawsuit continues in Walker County Circuit Court.

In 2017, Terry Benton sued, alleging five other inmates attacked and beat him in the jail in 2015. He was taken to a hospital for a rib contusion and sent back to the jail where he claims he was not given antibiotics. Benton was transferred to Fayette County Jail, admitted to a different hospital, and treated for an infection, he alleged.

“Benton is permanently disfigured, requires reconstructive facial surgery, and he suffers from nerve damage and chronic pain from his injuries,” his suit alleged. The county and sheriff settled the case in 2020. Details of the settlement are not public in court records.

Other complaints contain allegations that the building was dilapidated and unsafe.

In 2018, despite a history of suicidal tendencies, jailers put Jaime Martin in solitary confinement on a second story room, according to a lawsuit his mother filed in Walker County Circuit Court in 2020.

According to the lawsuit, his mental health was not assessed at Walker County Jail, and he was left unmonitored in the cell, which, due to general disrepair, had a broken light fixture without a protective covering. Martin used the cord from his pants to hang himself from the fixture. The county settled the case in 2022, but details are not public in court records.

Martin’s mother contends there was “widespread and unacceptable risk of suicide at the jail and that mental health services were grossly inadequate as another inmate had already died by hanging himself at the jail within months of Martin.”

Inmates were able to fashion weapons, the suit says, from loose pieces of concrete and metal strips from windows and door casings.

Walker County Jail and Sheriff Nick Smith did not respond to record requests from AL.com about jail policies for the use of restraint chairs and suicide watch. But Smith did talk to AL.com about medical care and his difficulty in finding employees.

Medical woes

Some of the more dire claims in recent years have challenged the lack of medical treatment inside the jail.

Like Mitchell’s mother, Michael Smothers’ mother filed suit after her son died while in custody in 2017. Smothers, 48, was arrested for failing to report for probation after writing a bad check for $150.

He went into the Walker County Jail the day before he was scheduled to get treatment for his legs, according to the suit filed in federal court in 2021, by his mother, Pamela Smothers. Her son had been in and out of the hospital for multiple health conditions, including chronic venous insufficiency, which caused painful swelling in his legs. He also had cirrhosis of the liver, COPD and recurrent cellulitis, which is a bacterial infection.

The lawsuit, which is set for trial next year, claims the jail failed to take Smothers to his health appointments for six months and failed to intervene when he developed sepsis, also known as blood poisoning, in his leg.

By the time Smothers was taken to the nearby hospital, it was too late. He was transferred to Montgomery for emergency treatment, but he fell into a coma and died, according to the suit.

The suit alleges that Preemptive Forensic Health Solutions, LLC, the company that provided the jail’s healthcare for many years, gave him Lasix, a drug to treat swelling, without taking him to a doctor, to save money and increase profits.

Roger Childers, the head of the company, did not respond to a request for comment from AL.com. In a response to the suit in 2021, Childers said that Smothers wasn’t willing to take his medication and denied other claims in the suit. “The defendant denies he was guilty of wrongful conduct as alleged by the plaintiff and demands strict proof hereof.”

Smothers wasn’t the only one to claim a family member died in the jail during that period.

Autumn Harris, 34, was accused of stealing $40. She was sent to jail after failing to appear at a hearing. In December of 2018, after three weeks in the Walker County Jail, she died of pneumonia.

Harris’s father filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against Preemptive Forensic Health Solutions, alleging jail nurses never treated Harris despite the fact she was diagnosed with pneumonia when she arrived at the jail.

“Pneumonia is one of the most common respiratory infections in the United States,” her attorney, Justin Jones, told AL.com earlier this year. “It’s a killer, and yet it’s very treatable. In this case, there was a systemic failure from start to finish to apply a well-established standard of health care to a patient. Those failures ultimately caused her death.”

Harris became too weak to walk or stand, lost control of her bodily functions, urinated on herself and reported trouble breathing, according to the suit, yet the jail treated her with its anxiety protocol, which included suggestions like taking walks and doing yoga. Medical staff did not provide her with an inhaler or other treatment, the suit alleged.

In its July of 2020 answer to the lawsuit, the company said it was not responsible for Harris’s death. “Defendants deny that the Plaintiff’s decedent’s death was caused by any conduct on their part.”

Last month, Preemptive Forensic Health Solutions, LLC, settled the lawsuit.

Making strides

After taking office in 2019, Sheriff Smith began sending all inmates with medical needs outside the jail for treatment, nearly doubling the county’s medical expenses.

In 2021, the county commission switched healthcare providers, choosing a larger company called Quality Correctional Health Care, which provides medical services to other jails in Alabama and in other states.

“We bid out medical services to get a reputable medical company,” Smith told AL.com.

Smith increased medical staffing at the jail from eight hours a day to 16. Now he is asking the county commission to pay for a nurse to be at the jail overnight.

Walker County Commissioner Jeff Burrough told AL.com that the larger company promised a lower and more predictable rate for medical services.

According to county records, Walker County spent nearly $1 million on inmate medical expenses in 2021, more than double the amount it spent just three years earlier, before the switch.

Burrough said he could not comment on Mitchell’s death or the company’s performance so far.

However, he said that the sheriff’s department is currently receiving about 60 percent of the county’s budget, which he said is higher than the average for most counties, something the Association of County Commissions of Alabama confirmed to AL.com.

“I think ever since the sheriff took office, he’s made strides and is trying to improve it,” Burrough said.

Yet Stacy Fuller, a nurse who worked with jail inmates outside the facility in her job with the drug recovery group, Recovery Organization of Support Specialists, told AL.com that inmates complained to her that there was a practice to deny all medications for 30 days, including heart and other life-saving medications.

Sheriff Smith said there was no such policy.

“They are not prevented from being on their meds.” he told AL.com. “Precautions are taken and a verification is made that they are on the medication they claim to take.”

Staffing problems

Under the 1995 consent order, each inmate in Walker County was required to have 39 square feet of space to themselves, and none could be made to sleep on the floor or on mattresses on the floor. The jail was required to put policies in writing and give them to inmates.

The consent order also required the jail to build an indoor-outdoor exercise facility and give inmates access an hour each day, four days a week. It stated inmates should have freedom to move between the cells and the day room during the day.

Inmates with serious mental illness would be diagnosed and treated. Dental care would be routinely provided. Medication would be given out by doctors’ orders, not discontinued, and one holding cell should remain “suicide resistant.”

According to Sheriff Smith, the consent decree ended in 2006. He said he is not sure when things started to go downhill or if they ever improved at the jail. When he entered office in 2019, the jail was starting renovations.

In 2017, former Sheriff Jim Underwood sued the county in two lawsuits after the county commission shifted the costs of feeding inmates to the jail. Underwood claimed the county was failing to cover the necessary costs of operating the jail. Both cases were dismissed in 2019.

According to Smith, financial barriers remain. He said it’s difficult to retain skilled workers at the jail for the amount he can pay them.

“My challenge is finding good, qualified people who are willing to come and put their life on the line for $13 an hour, when just about every agency in this county…(is) starting out at $20 plus.”

Terry Martin’s 2019 suit said other inmates beat him and kicked him as he lay unconscious on the floor, but no guards came to help. He spent 13 days in the ICU to have multiple surgeries to repair his jaw, face and eye socket, and needed a steel plate to reconstruct part of his face. Martin now has a cleft palate and is blind.

His suit alleged the jail was short at least 12 full-time staff for 240 inmates, leaving jail workers fearful or unable to respond to fights.

“No guards came to the cell-block to help stop the fight or protect Martin from further harm,” his suit claims. The county settled the case in 2021, but the details of the settlement are not public in court records.

Two years earlier, clever inmates exploited staffing shortfalls to break out.

In 2017, 12 inmates escaped from Walker County Jail using peanut butter to fashion door numbers to trick a guard into opening the wrong door and releasing them outdoors.

Red tape

Once in the jail in Walker County, it can be hard to get out. Over the years, lawsuits have also alleged inmates are forgotten in the jail for weeks and months on end without being given court dates.

A lawsuit brought by Dailen Gaines in July of 2020 alleges many people who are charged with failure to appear and end up in the Walker County Jail are forgotten. Gaines had been waiting in jail for 30 days to have a date set to go before a judge after failing to appear for an initial hearing. A Walker County judge dismissed the lawsuit last year.

“These individuals sit and languish in the Walker County Jail, many for minor offenses, most unrepresented by counsel, for days, weeks, and sometimes months on end,” the lawsuit alleges.

Christopher Wayne Reno sued the jail and sheriff in July of 2019, saying he had not gotten a court date in over seven months and had been held on $50,000 bond for a year without a trial date. He also said he needed some “help mentally.” His suit was dismissed in 2020.

Smith said some had been in the jail for years when he took office.

Other inmates sued, alleging they were locked up with excessive bail.

Smith said he has worked with area judges to get inmates’ cases processed more quickly and that has helped reduce overcrowding at the jail, which had about 100 inmates beyond its 280 beds when he took office in 2019. He said that’s not the case today.

“Even if you’re convicted of a crime,” said Smith, “The longest the county jail needs to hold somebody is a year and a day.”

James Shedd, who spent time in Walker County Jail before heading to prison on sex crimes convictions, told AL.com that he was put in a room nicknamed ‘the freezer’ for its sometimes-cold temperatures. Shedd said he was not suicidal but was placed in the room naked on ‘suicide watch.’

“(It took) over two hours just to get my body temperature back up to where it’s supposed to be because my feet, my hands and all was done numb.”

Shedd, who is now sitting in an overcrowded state prison in Limestone County, said he was stabbed and beaten in state prison, but he would rather be there than in Walker County Jail.

“I’m still 10 times better off here.”