Anthony Barsotti looks on the verge of death. His skin is ashen, his face gaunt. His mouth gapes as he stares at the ceiling, sporadically sucking in breaths.

Three hours earlier, Anthony was a physically healthy 23-year-old living in the state’s care at a Gainesville mental hospital.

Then he took a swing at another mental patient and a hospital orderly launched him head-first into a concrete wall. Workers at North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center have a good chance to save his life this night in July 2010.

Instead, as hospital security cameras roll, they make one mistake after another.

FLORIDA’S STATE-FUNDED MENTAL HOSPITALS are supposed to be safe places to house and treat people who are a danger to themselves or others.

But years of neglect and $100 million in budget cuts have turned them into treacherous warehouses where violence is out of control and patients can’t get the care they need.

Since 2009, violent attacks at the state’s six largest hospitals have doubled. Nearly 1,000 patients ordered to the hospitals for close supervision managed to injure themselves or someone else.

In some ways, South Pasadena is a preview of what the country will look like as the population of the “oldest old” soars from 5.7 million today to 19 million by 2050.

Gretchen worked with Times reporter Leonora LaPeter Anton for months on a story about living with a rare medical condition. But her suicide just before the story published left family, friends and the media all asking “Why?”

After confiding in his family about the trauma he’d been dealing with for decades, Richard Bell Jr. walks arm in arm with his daughter, Retinna Bell, 34.

A five-year divorce: Four judges, six lawyers, $400,000 in attorney and expert fees and costs, a child yanked back and forth, all the petty arguing, for what?