Murder trial underway in Anger Room entrepreneur’s head injury death in North Texas
Precisely how Donna Alexander came to suffer the brain and skull injury that caused her death is at the core of a murder trial underway this week in a state district court in Tarrant County.
Experts reached a range of conclusions on whether the swelling and subdural hemorrhage inside her head were the result of an accidental fall, a forced fall or being struck by an object.
It will be up to a jury to decide if the injury’s source was criminal or accidental.
Tarrant County prosecutors allege that Alexander’s death in September 2018 was intentionally caused by Nathaniel Mitchell, a man whom she had dated, at a house in Grand Prairie in the hours after they argued inside her car. The case drew national attention at the time of Alexander’s death in part because she operated Anger Room, a business in Dallas where customers could alleviate stress by smashing items in rooms made to look like a workplace or a living area.
Mitchell and Alexander were dating in September 2018. Whether they were living together is, much like the cause of the head injury, in dispute.
Mitchell told a police officer that Alexander slipped and fell outside the shower and hit the back of her head. Mitchell drove her to a microhospital, staffed by one doctor per shift, where she moaned to a nurse and could not communicate what had happened.
The nurse, two emergency medicine physicians and a forensic pathologist have testified as state witnesses to offer opinions on in what way Alexander may have sustained the injury.
In the prosecution’s opening statement on Tuesday, Assistant District Attorney Chase Payne told the jurors in the 432nd District Court in Fort Worth that although the expert assessments were not definitive, evidence of the context of the couple’s ended relationship and Mitchell’s efforts to lie, manipulate and cover up would help to show the jury that Mitchell intentionally killed Alexander.
The nebulous elements of the injury were clear in the testimony of the doctor who treated Alexander at the microhospital.
“You don’t know what caused the injury?” defense attorney Steve Gebhardt asked on cross examination of Dr. Dillon Paul.
“That’s correct,” Dr. Paul testified.
Gebhardt was, with attorney Jack Strickland, appointed to represent Mitchell.
Mitchell recounted the cause of the injury in at least two ways: the shower slip account to the police and during a direct encounter he described in a text message to a childhood friend.
“Me and Donna got into it,” Mitchell wrote in the message that the state displayed on a screen to the jury.
Alexander was “chasing me and fell and bumped her head,” he wrote.
Alexander died on Sept. 24, 2018, at a Dallas hospital.
Mitchell, 41, is also under indictment in the case on charges of burglary with the intent to commit assault and intent to commit aggravated assault. The case was originally filed as a capital murder under the state’s allegation that the death was a killing that occurred when Mitchell broke a window to get into Alexander’s house. A grand jury indicted Mitchell on murder.
The Anger Room business was included on an episode of “The Real Housewives of Dallas,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Alexander grew up in Chicago and moved to the Dallas area as a young adult.
She first tested her business model by selling to friends and relatives time to bash household items in her garage.
Businesses similar to the Anger Room were started nationwide after Alexander pioneered the idea.
“Donna’s thing was, instead of people hurting people, why not let it out on objects so a life isn’t lost, to keep people out of jail?” Alexander’s sister, Lauren Armour of Chicago, told the Tribune in 2018.
This story includes information from the Star-Telegram’s archives.
This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 10:20 AM.
