Race Jones
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On December 12, 2021, a 23-year-old Black woman named Lauren Smith-Fields was found dead in her apartment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, after a Bumble date. In the month and a half since her death, her family has insisted that her case was not taken seriously and police bungled the investigation. This week, her death was ruled an accidental overdose, but her family still has questions, and they’ve announced that they plan to sue the city of Bridgeport for being “racially insensitive” and failing to properly investigate her death.
Smith-Fields’s case is far from the first time a Black woman’s death has failed to receive the resources, attention, and public concern generally reserved for white victims. Smith-Fields’s family’s lawyer, Darnell Crosland, has cited the case of Gabby Petito, a white 22-year-old influencer who disappeared and was eventually confirmed to have died during a trip she took with her boyfriend in September. The families of missing Black and Indigenous women have argued that Petito’s case — and those of white women like her — receive far more media attention than is given to women like Smith-Fields.
While her family awaits the results of an independent autopsy, Bridgeport has also opened a criminal investigation into Smith-Fields’s death concerning the involvement of fentanyl. Here’s what we know so far.
Smith-Fields had a Bumble date the night she died.
Smith-Fields was found unresponsive in the early morning of December 12, after a 37-year-old white man named Matthew LaFountain called 911. LaFountain had been on a date with Smith-Fields the previous night and claims that when he woke up that morning, she was lying on her right side not breathing, with blood dripping from her nose.
In LaFountain’s account, he recalls arriving at Smith-Fields’s apartment around 9:30 p.m the night before; he said the two had matched on Bumble three days prior. He claims she asked him for $40 to do her nails and told him to meet at her house with a bottle of tequila. Per LaFountain, they drank tequila before playing games, having food, and watching a movie. At one point, he says, she went to the bathroom to throw up, and at another point he says she went outside to get something from her brother and then went to the bathroom for 10 to 15 minutes. The police report says that LaFountain found it “odd, but didn’t feel it was his place to say anything as he didn’t know her that well.” He claims that she fell asleep during the movie and he carried her into the bedroom and slept next to her, and that he woke up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and heard her snoring. Then, at 6:30 a.m., he woke up to find her not breathing. She was pronounced dead at 6:59 a.m., and a medic said she had not been alive for “at least an hour.”
LaFountain, who the incident report says was “frantic” and “visibly shaken,” was not taken into custody. As of January 26, he has not been named as a person of interest, nor was he detained at the station for questioning. Smith-Fields’s brother was later told they didn’t bring him in because he seemed like a “nice guy.”
Police didn’t contact her family, nor did they immediately examine the crime scene.
No one in Smith-Fields’s family was notified of her death; per Rolling Stone, police spoke to her landlord when they arrived at the scene, but were unable to track down contact information for her family. Her mother, Shantall Fields, says she went to her daughter’s apartment a day and a half later when she hadn’t answered texts and calls and found a note on the door that said, “If you are looking for Lauren, please contact this number.” Upon calling the number, Fields was notified of her daughter’s death and told that the detective assigned to the case would be there in half an hour. After waiting over an hour, she says she called the number again and was told to stop calling before being hung up on.
The police didn’t do a crime-scene investigation until later that week, when the case was reassigned to a different detective. According to Smith-Fields’s brother Lakeem Jetter, he and his family noticed cups of liquor, flipped plates, and lube in the apartment, and a blood stain in the middle of her bed, none of which were initially examined as evidence. Two and a half weeks after the search, on December 29, her family was cleaning out Smith-Fields’s apartment when they found a used condom in the trash and an unidentified pill, none of which appear to have been taken into evidence. Meanwhile, according to the family’s lawyer, no evidence has been submitted to the forensic-science lab.
Celebrities have spoken out
Cardi B Instrumental in Lauren Smith-Fields Death Investigation, Family Says
Lauren Smith-Fields' family says Cardi B was instrumental in getting the police to investigate her death as a crime.
www.tmz.com
Rapper BIA Involved in Lauren Smith-Fields Death Case
Rapper BIA met with the family lawyer for Lauren Smith-Fields and wants to meet her family while raising awareness about her death.
www.tmz.com
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