Six weeks after Lauren Smith-Fields's death, Bridgeport, Conn., police open criminal investigation

More than a month and a half after the death of Lauren Smith-Fields, the 23-year-old college student who died in her Bridgeport, Conn., apartment after meeting up with an older man earlier that evening, Bridgeport police announced Tuesday they are opening a criminal investigation into her death, Darnell Crosland, the attorney for Smith-Fields’s family, confirmed to Yahoo News.

“It’s been a very emotional roller coaster for the family,” Crosland said.

This latest development comes just a day after the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released Smith-Fields’s autopsy results, saying she died from an overdose of fentanyl combined with prescription medication and alcohol. Her death has been ruled an accident, the office told Yahoo News.

“It breaks [the family’s] heart,” Crosland said, noting that they say Smith-Fields didn’t do drugs, rarely drank liquor and regularly went to the gym. “The question is less what toxins were in her body but how they got there.”

For many, the news provides some answers into Smith-Fields’s death, but her family remains frustrated by the city’s handling of the case thus far. Smith-Fields, who was Black, has not been given the investigation she deserves, the family says.

“They have no respect for us,” Smith-Fields’s mother, Shantell Fields, told Yahoo News earlier this month. “You can tell the way they treated us.”

Meanwhile, the man she was found with, who is white, has not been charged, detained or fully investigated, according to the family’s attorney.

“The fact that the police failed to investigate the man she was found with as a person of interest leaves us with more questions than answers,” said Crosland.

Bridgeport, Connecticut’s most populous city with a diverse population of more than 145,000 people, is no stranger to controversy and even scandal. Federal authorities have arrested five Bridgeport officials in the last two years.

In 2020, the city’s then police chief, Armando Perez, a close friend of Mayor Joe Ganim, was charged with rigging his own hiring process to ensure he became the city’s top cop; he was sentenced to a year in jail. Ganim also previously spent nearly seven years in prison after being convicted on felony charges that included extortion, bribery and racketeering while he was mayor of Bridgeport in the early 2000s. He went on to mount a comeback campaign for mayor.

Ganim, noting the pain that Smith-Fields’s family has endured the last six weeks, on Monday said the city’s Office of Internal Affairs, which is part of the police department, will conduct a “full and fair investigation” into the police’s handling of her death.

“There is no tolerance for anything less than respect and sensitivity for family members and their loss,” Ganim said in a statement. “Therefore, I will work with the Chief of Police to make appropriate changes here in Bridgeport now our department’s policies and practices regarding notifying family members of a death.”

Bridgeport police declined Yahoo News’ request for comment. The front desk staffer who answered the phone hastily stated, “It’s all over the internet. Put her name in,” before hanging up.

For weeks, the family of Smith-Fields has been calling out what it views as a lack of respect from Bridgeport police toward the family since her death.

“The police just don’t care,” Fields said. “And we feel that there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors.”

According to local reports, Smith-Fields, a budding social media influencer enrolled at Norwalk Community College, was found unresponsive by police in her apartment on Dec. 12 and later died there. Earlier that evening she had met up with an “older white man” she had previously connected with on the dating site Bumble, her family says. The man, who the family identifies as Matthew LaFountain, is said to be the person who called authorities. However, LaFountain was never detained.

“When there is no foul play, there is no crime,” Rowena White, Bridgeport’s communications director, told Yahoo News.

City officials urged patience in the investigation, but its handling continued to give the family pause. Lakeem Jetter, Smith-Fields’s brother, told News 12 Westchester that police said the man his sister met via Bumble was a “nice guy” and did not need to be investigated.

Smith-Fields’s family was also never notified of her death by police, and only found out from a paper left on her door when they went to visit her.

“How do I not get any notification that my daughter passed away?” Fields asked.

Once inside the apartment, Fields said she found a condom with semen inside and a pill that the family believes could be a sedative.

Crosland, the family’s attorney, said police failed on the first day of the investigation.

One of the responding officers has been removed from the case pending an internal investigation, for what Crosland called disregarding basic protocol.

Smith-Fields’s father, Everett Smith, has paid for a second autopsy because of how the investigation was being handled. That second report has not yet been completed.

This past Sunday more than 100 family members and supporters marched on what would have been Smith-Fields’s 24th birthday from the police department to City Hall, chanting her name along with “Black Lives Matter.”

“We shouldn’t have to fight for justice,” Crosland said. “We would be sitting in the bleacher seats watching police handle this case, supporting them and feeling as though Smith-Fields has value. Instead we have to march for her on her birthday while this plays out in public.”

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Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: family (2)