Anthony Mitchell, 33, alarmed his cousin Steve Mitchell when he showed up at his house, looking thin and much older than months before, acting psychotic, and insisting he must enter a “portal to hell” in his mother’s attic to retrieve the body of his long-ago stillborn brother. After a 911 call, Mitchell was picked up by sheriffs’ deputies who said he’d fired a gun at them and ran into the woods.

The Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, according to the suit, told the family they’d get him medical help in Walker County Jail. Instead, guards tased Mitchell and locked him in a freezer, killing him, the suit alleges. The suit filed Monday also contends jail leadership began a cover up of Mitchell’s death hours before he died.

“This case,” the suit says, “therefore presents an appalling question: how does a man literally freeze to death while incarcerated in a modern climate-controlled jail, in the custody and care of corrections officers?”

The lawsuit alleges the abuse and medical neglect Mitchell experienced at the hands of Sheriff Nick Smith and 13 staff at the county jail, including corrections officers, nurses and an investigator was filed Monday in federal court in the Northern District of Alabama by Margaret Mitchell, who is Mitchell’s mother and the administrator of his estate.

“While Tony languished naked and dying of hypothermia,” the lawsuit says, “numerous corrections officers and medical staff wandered over to his open cell door to spectate and be entertained by his condition.”

A former deputy also filed a separate, but related lawsuit on Monday in federal court in Alabama’s Northern District. Former Corrections Officer Karen Kelly sued the Walker County Sheriff’s Office and multiple officers for being fired and for retaliation after she shared videos with Mitchell’s family of him being abused in the jail.

“This is the worst case of inmate abuse I have ever seen,” said attorney for the estate, Jon Goldfarb.

The Sheriff’s department and the county jail did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

Mitchell, who had a history of addiction to methamphetamine, lived with his father in Carbon Hill, Alabama. His mother paid his utility bills and brought him food, according to the lawsuit.

Mitchell spiraled out of control in the months after his father’s death this fall taking drugs and experiencing mental health problems, according to the suit. He lost about 100 pounds in three months. He looked so “haggard and emaciated, that his cousin, Steve, said he almost didn’t recognize him when he showed up at his house on January 13, according to the complaint. Mitchell said he wanted to share a secret no one else knew.

“Obviously delusional, Tony told Steve that he, Tony, had a brother who had been stillborn, which was true. Tony further told Steve that his parents had put the baby brother’s body in a box that was hidden in the attic of the house.” This was not correct, according to the complaint.

Mitchell said he needed to rip out a wall in the attic to find his baby brother’s body, according to the family’s suit. He said there were two portals in the house, one to heaven and another to hell. He wanted to put his brother in the portal to heaven.

Steve took Tony to show him there was no box in the attic before calling 911 and reporting Tony’s mental breakdown and asking for an ambulance. Sheriff’s officers arrived at Tony’s house and found him in a psychotic state, according to the complaint and according to reports at the time. His face was spray painted black so he could enter the portal to hell in the attic.

Deputies claimed in a Facebook statement that Mitchell fired a handgun at them before retreating into the woods where he was arrested

The sheriff’s public information officer, T.J. Armstrong, a defendant in the suit, took a picture of Mitchell’s painted face and shared it on social media, where it spread quickly. According to the suit, Armstrong assured Mitchell’s cousin that he would get medical treatment in jail.

“‘We’re going to detox him and then we’ll see how much of his brain is left,’ or words to that effect,” said Armstrong, according to the suit.

The suit says Mitchell was put in an isolation cell, not meant to hold inmates, in the booking area of the Walker County Jail where he was left for most of the 14 days before his death. He was not given medical care, according to the suit.

The room had cement floors with a drain but no bed or toilet, and Mitchell had nothing to sleep on. He also was left naked, according to the suit, possibly because of the jail’s “suicide watch” policy, until he was taken to the hospital, dying of hypothermia, 14 days later.

Officer Kelly took video recordings of security footage of the events leading up to Mitchell’s death and shared them publicly. Her lawsuit alleges she was fired in retaliation afterward.

One video showed Mitchell being dragged, naked, across the floor by officers, according to the family’s suit. Another, from January 15, two days after he was taken to jail, shows him being tased, naked, by a group of officers in the doorway of his isolation cell, the family’s suit says.

According to the lawsuit, Mitchell, who relied on false teeth after years of methamphetamine use, lost his teeth as he was tased. When his teeth fell to the ground, officers confiscated them. Already emaciated, Mitchell was unable to chew food without his teeth and went days without eating, the lawsuit alleges.

Jail incident reports from Jan. 26 viewed by Kelly, according to the family suit, state two officers, Braxton Kee and Jacob Smith, found Mitchell unresponsive at feeding time, around 4 a.m. The family’s suit alleges he had been left for hours in a restraint chair in a jail freezer before the officers found him.

The suit says the jail kitchen typically opens at 3 a.m. and Mitchell was not taken to the hospital until 8:30 a.m.

“This means that after Tony was removed from the walk-in freezer or other frigid environment, at least five hours passed before he was transported to Walker County Medical Center, despite his obvious serious medical need for emergency medical treatment,” the lawsuit states, adding that his chances of survival dwindled by the hour as he suffered from hypothermia.

Security footage from 4 a.m. that morning showed Mitchell lying naked on a pile of trash on the cement floor of his cell as officers laughed at him, according to the suit. Video also showed jail nurse, Alicia Herron, enter the cell and spend a couple of minutes inside, appearing to give no medical treatment, according to the suit.

According to the suit, a video from 6 a.m., when a shift change happened, showed officers peering inside Mitchell’s room through the door. They brought a sleeping mat into his room. Nurse Brad Allred was recorded standing at the door of the cell looking at Mitchell. Officers began sweeping trash out of the cell as Mitchell lay on the floor.

At 8:30 a.m. officers removed Mitchell from his cell in a wheelchair. He was dressed in an orange jail uniform. He fell out of the wheelchair outside the cell and deputies put him back in it. His body made slow and spasmodic movements, according to the complaint. Deputies then picked up Mitchel and dragged him back into the cell, according to the complaint.

Four deputies then carried Mitchell outside the jail to an SUV. They placed him on the ground to open the door, allowing his head to rest on the concrete. In the video, he appeared unconscious. Officers then lifted him into the vehicle and drove him to Walker County Medical Center.

By the time they reached the hospital, the suit says, Mitchell was breathing with difficulty, only two to four breaths a minute. According to the suit, deputies did not tell hospital staff Mitchell had been put in a fridge. Mitchell was cold to the touch when he arrived in the E.R. according to the suit.

“Learning that Tony was hypothermic caused physicians to immediately change their course of treatment, as the measures they had initially employed were inappropriate to resuscitate a person who is severely hypothermic,” the suit stated. After three hours of trying to save Mitchell, he was pronounced dead at 1:15 p.m.

“I am not sure what circumstances the patient was held in incarceration, but it is difficult to understand a rectal temperature of 72 (degrees),” an emergency room physician wrote in Mitchell’s medical records. The doctor listed his cause of death as hypothermia but stated that the cause of it was not clear. An autopsy has yet to be performed.

Days later, County Sheriff, Nick Smith and communications officer T.J. Armstrong gave a statement to the press. “The inmate was alert and conscious when he left the facility and arrived at the hospital,” the statement said.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is investigating the death.

Jon Goldfarb, attorney for Mitchell’s estate said the videos show correctional officers laughing as Mitchell lay naked and dying.

“People who have seen these videos think they are watching something in Russia or Abu Ghraib,” he said, “but this happened in our own backyard in Walker County, Alabama.”