A man held in an Alabama jail was found hanging from a sheet in his cell just hours after jailers discontinued his suicide supervision at a shift change — and now his estate is suing the city that was supposed to keep him alive.
Clay Aaron Estes was a pretrial detainee at the Orange Beach Police Department Jail. He died August 12, 2025, three days after he was taken into custody. His estate filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Orange Beach and ten unidentified jailers, officers, and supervisors, alleging that every layer of custody — from intake screening to shift-change handoffs to emergency response — failed Estes, and that those failures aren't bugs in the system. They are the system.
According to AL.com's reporting on the complaint, Estes exhibited
