Tenth Alabama Jail Employee Pleads Guilty in Detainee’s Freezing Death
On February 11, 2025, Megan Johnson, a former guard at Alabama’s Walker County Jail, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the civil rights of detainee Anthony “Tony” Mitchell when she failed to keep him from freezing to death at the lockup in January 2023. Hers was the tenth confession by a jail staffer charged after Mitchell’s death.
As PLN reported, Mitchell, 33, died at a hospital, where a doctor wrote that it was “difficult to understand a rectal temperature of 72°F. while someone is incarcerated in jail.” But guards had in fact held him naked for two weeks in a feces-and-trash-filled cell called “the freezer” because they could—and did— vent the winter air inside. For that, guard Joshua Connor Jones agreed to plead guilty to similar charges in July 2024, and fellow guard Karen Kim Elsie Kelly did the same the following month. [See: PLN, Sep. 2024, p.19.]
Another plea agreement was entered in late January 2025 by former guard Benjamin Daniel Shoemaker. Former guard Courtlan Brent Jones agreed to plead guilty in December 2024. Another former guard, Bailey Clark Ganey pleaded guilty in November 2024, the same month that a guilty plea agreement was signed by former guard Daniel Lee Allen Brown. Two more plea agreements were signed by fellow former guards Grayson Colin Woods and Heather Craig in October 2024, along with a third by contract psychiatric nurse Daniel Wyers.
All the staffers admitted that they knew Mitchell was being horribly mistreated but did nothing about it, apparently miffed that the mentally ill detainee fired on cops sent to perform a welfare check at his home. None of those shots injured the officers, who arrested Mitchell and took him to the jail.
Once there, according to Shoemaker’s plea agreement, he and another guard came up with a plan to take advantage of Mitchell’s mental illness by filling his cell with feces and trash, making him look dangerous and their jobs look more difficult to justify a raise request from a county commissioner scheduled to stop by. When another guard not in on the plot cleaned the cell before that visit, Shoemaker bribed another detainee with a package of honey buns to “act crazy” when the commissioner arrived. Shoemaker also admitted to assaulting two compliant detainees, bloodying one so badly that it covered the guard’s pants—for which he was commended by unwitting jail administrators who promoted him to lieutenant. See: United States v. Shoemaker, USDC (N.D. Ala.), Case No. 6:25-cr-00016.
All 10 former jail staffers face up to a year in prison when sentenced. Meanwhile, a suit filed by Mitchell’s estate was stayed in December 2024 pending the outcome of criminal charges that Defendant Patricia Hammonds said federal prosecutors had advised her they would be filing. Like Wyers, Hammonds was a nurse at the jail when Mitchell died. See: Mitchell v. Smith, USDC (N.D. Ala.), Case No. 2:23-cv-00182.
Additional sources: WBRC, WIAT
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