A Vanished Voices companion piece
On December 12, 2021, 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Fields was found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut apartment after a first date arranged through Bumble. Her death was ultimately ruled an accident. But the story of what happened after she died — how her case was investigated, who was and wasn’t held accountable, and what her family has fought for in the years since — is still unfolding today, in 2026, nearly five years later.
This is the full account behind our episode on her case.
Who Was Lauren
Lauren Smith-Fields grew up moving between Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut. At Stamford High School, she ran track — by her family’s account, she was talented at it, the kind of athlete who made it look easy. After graduating, she enrolled at Norwalk Community College to study cosmetology, with an eye toward eventually becoming a physical therapist. In the meantime, she built a small hair business of her own to help cover the cost of school.
By the fall of 2021, she was 23 years old, working, studying, and — like most people her age — using dating apps. She matched with a man named Matthew LaFountain on Bumble in early December. He was 37, a design engineer at a Connecticut company that manufactures cables for military and aerospace applications. They talked for a few days before agreeing to meet in person.
The Night of December 11
On the evening of December 11, 2021, LaFountain came to Lauren’s apartment for their first date. According to the account he later gave police, the two drank tequila shots, played games, ate food, and watched a movie. LaFountain told police that Lauren became ill at one point during the night and vomited. Later, according to his account, she received a text message and stepped outside — he said she went to meet her brother, who had stopped by. She returned and spent ten to fifteen minutes in the bathroom before rejoining him.
Eventually, LaFountain said, Lauren fell asleep. He told police he carried her to her bedroom, laid her on the bed, and lay down beside her.
Around 6:00–6:30 a.m. on December 12, LaFountain woke to find Lauren unresponsive, with blood coming from her right nostril. He called 911 and, per the dispatcher’s instructions, attempted chest compressions. Lauren was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:49 a.m.
It is important to note that nearly everything known about that night comes from LaFountain’s own account, relayed through the police incident report. Lauren’s family has since disputed at least one detail of it directly. According to the family’s federal complaint, when Lauren’s brother stopped by the apartment that night, Lauren “was not visibly ill, drunk, or unwell, nor did she make mention of feeling ill or drinking that night” — a direct contradiction of LaFountain’s account, which describes her becoming sick earlier in the evening.
A Notification That Never Really Happened
What followed is where this case becomes less about one tragic night and more about a pattern of institutional failure.
Bridgeport Police did attempt, in a limited way, to locate Lauren’s family. They contacted her landlord — but he had no next-of-kin contact information on file. At that point, rather than pursuing other means of locating family (Lauren’s own confiscated cell phone was already in police custody), officers left their information with the landlord and asked him to pass it along the next time he saw a family member. No further follow-up occurred.
The landlord, on his own initiative, wrote a note and taped it to Lauren’s apartment door: “If you’re looking for Lauren, call this number.” The note did not direct anyone to the police department. It directed them to him.
Lauren’s mother, Shantell Fields, grew concerned when her daughter — normally quick to respond — stopped answering calls and texts. On December 13, roughly 24 hours after Lauren’s death, Shantell and Lauren’s brother drove to the apartment and found the note. They called the number and reached the landlord, who told them something had happened to Lauren and that she was deceased.
The landlord then gave them a card with the phone number of Detective Kevin Cronin, the officer assigned to the case. The family called Cronin that same evening. He told them he would arrive within thirty minutes. He never did. When they called back to ask why, Cronin told them to “stop calling” and hung up the phone — an incident later confirmed in the family’s own federal complaint as occurring on December 13, 2021, the day after Lauren’s death. A month later, on January 13, 2022, Shantell herself called for an update on the investigation and was told the same thing — “stop calling” — this time by a different, unidentified officer.
Days passed before any Bridgeport police officer returned to the apartment. When someone finally did, the case had been quietly reassigned to a different detective, Garcia — whose visit marked, by the family’s account, the first real crime-scene work conducted at the apartment since Lauren’s death.
Evidence Left Behind
Bridgeport Police did collect some items from the scene on December 12: Lauren’s phone, ID, passport, cash, and keys. But other potential evidence was left in the apartment.
On December 26, Lauren’s family held her funeral. Three days later, on December 29, they returned to the apartment to begin packing up her belongings — not to investigate, but simply to handle what any grieving family does after a loss. While cleaning, they discovered a used condom, lubrication, bloodstained sheets, and an unidentified pill on the kitchen counter — none of which had been collected, bagged, or apparently even noted by police in the more than two weeks since Lauren’s death.
According to the family’s later federal complaint, the full list of evidence police failed to timely collect was longer still: women’s undergarments, vomit, the food consumed that evening, and — critically — the glassware Lauren and LaFountain had actually been drinking from that night. The complaint also alleges police never performed a rape kit at all.
The family called police again. It took additional time before officers returned to collect the items — and, according to the family’s attorney, when they arrived, one officer asked the family whether there was “anything else” they thought should be collected.
Even after collection, the evidence did not immediately move forward. Weeks later, the state forensic laboratory confirmed it had never received the items for processing.
The tequila involved that night also went untested. According to LaFountain’s own account to police, he was the one who brought the bottle, at Lauren’s request (along with $40 she’d asked him to bring for a nail appointment), and the two drank from it together. No testing was ever conducted on the bottle — nor, as far as public records show, on any glassware either of them drank from that night. A clean bottle, had it been tested, would not have ruled out something being introduced elsewhere, such as into a single glass; that possibility was never examined at all.
No DNA sample was ever collected from Matthew LaFountain. Accounts differ as to why. LaFountain’s attorney, Peter Karayiannis, stated publicly that his client cooperated with police “for several hours” on the day of Lauren’s death and would continue to cooperate “to help definitively determine what happened.” Lauren’s brother, however, told reporters that police informed the family LaFountain was not cooperating with requests for a DNA sample. These two accounts have never been publicly reconciled.
When Lauren’s brother asked a detective whether LaFountain would be investigated, he says he was told: “He’s a nice man. Don’t jump to any conclusions.”
An Unverified but Unretracted Allegation
The family’s attorney, Darnell Crosland, has made a serious public claim that we want to include here with full transparency about its evidentiary status: he has alleged that LaFountain had “a huge connection” to the Bridgeport Police Department, and that Detective Cronin specifically had some personal connection to LaFountain — going so far as to suggest Cronin “may have unofficially arrived at the apartment to assist Mr. LaFountain in a cover-up.”
This allegation has never been independently verified in any reporting we could find, nor does it appear in the internal affairs findings or the federal civil rights lawsuit later filed on Lauren’s behalf. It has also never been retracted or debunked. It remains, as of this writing, an unresolved public claim from the family’s own legal counsel — presented here neither as established fact nor as something to dismiss.
The Medical Examiner’s Ruling
On January 25, 2022 — six weeks after Lauren’s death — Connecticut’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released its finding: Lauren died of acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, promethazine, hydroxyzine, and alcohol. Her death was ruled accidental.
Lauren’s family has consistently disputed this conclusion — not the toxicology itself, but the implication that she took these substances knowingly. Shantell Fields has said repeatedly that her daughter did not use drugs, describing her as someone who exercised daily, maintained a plant-based diet, and was actively building her future.
Crosland has pointed to the specific combination of substances found in Lauren’s system, stating that this combination is one associated with facilitating sexual assault, and the family has said publicly that they suspect she may have been drugged without her knowledge.
This is also where the disputed detail from earlier in the night becomes significant. LaFountain told police that Lauren went outside during the evening to meet her brother, who had apparently stopped by to give her something. The family disputes this account entirely — they say her brother did not come by to deliver anything related to drugs, but rather that Lauren went out briefly to drop off clothing for him, an unremarkable errand with no connection to what LaFountain described.
There is no way, based on the public record, to resolve this discrepancy. No DNA was collected. No glassware was tested. The official ruling of “accident” stands, unchallenged by any subsequent legal action, alongside a family’s unresolved and unprovable belief that something else happened that night.
A Parallel Tragedy: Brenda Lee Rawls
Lauren Smith-Fields was not the only Bridgeport woman who died under similar circumstances that day. On the same date — December 12, 2021 — 53-year-old Brenda Lee Rawls was found dead in a neighbor’s home, after spending time with a man her family knew little about.
As with Lauren’s case, Bridgeport Police never notified Rawls’ family of her death. Her sister, Dorothy Washington, and other relatives eventually located the man’s home themselves and learned of Brenda’s death in person.
Detective Kevin Cronin — the same detective assigned to Lauren’s case — was also assigned to investigate Brenda’s death. An internal affairs investigator later reviewed a recorded phone call between Cronin and Rawls’ family, describing it as “rude and abrasive” and lacking “basic human dignity, compassion, or empathy,” noting the call “deteriorated into a verbal sparring match.”
Rawls’ official cause of death was ruled cardiovascular disease, with diabetes as a contributing factor — manner of death: natural causes. Her family has publicly stated they have “reason to question” this finding as well, citing similar investigative shortcomings.
Both Cronin and the detective assigned to Lauren’s case, Angel Llanos, were placed on administrative leave in late January 2022 pending an internal affairs investigation into their handling of both cases. In May 2022, an independent arbitrator ordered both men reinstated to full duty, ruling that the department had not sufficiently justified placing them on leave. Both were awarded back pay for missed overtime opportunities. As of 2024, both remained active detectives with the Bridgeport Police Department; the city has declined to disclose whether any further discipline was ultimately imposed.
Public Pressure and a Delayed Criminal Investigation
For roughly six weeks after Lauren’s death, her case remained largely a local story, despite her family’s public efforts to draw attention to it. That changed when TikTok creators began widely sharing details of the case, generating significant national attention. Recording artist Cardi B publicly commented on the case as well.
Within days of that surge in public pressure, Bridgeport Police — which had, to that point, treated Lauren’s death as a closed accidental-overdose matter — opened a formal criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death, with assistance from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
What the Internal Affairs Records Later Revealed
In 2024, journalists at CT Insider obtained internal affairs records related to both cases through Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act, following a lengthy and contested records battle with the city.
Those records showed that Detective Llanos did not produce a written report on Lauren’s death until ordered to do so — fifteen days after she died. He never canvassed her neighborhood for potential witnesses. He did not return to process the scene of her death until eighteen days after her passing.
City officials declined to disclose whether Llanos or Cronin faced any additional discipline beyond their initial (and subsequently reversed) suspensions. Bridgeport also resisted CT Insider’s public records requests for related materials — including 911 audio, body camera footage, and complete investigative reports — for more than seven months, citing a records exemption that Connecticut’s own Freedom of Information Commission characterized as an unusual application of the law in this context.
The Lawsuits — and Two Very Different Outcomes
In December 2023, both families filed separate federal civil rights lawsuits against the City of Bridgeport, each seeking more than $30 million in damages. Lauren’s lawsuit — Fields v. City of Bridgeport, No. 3:23-CV-01608 (KAD) — also named Bumble and Matthew LaFountain as defendants, alongside the City and five individual Bridgeport officers (Detectives Carla Remele and Kevin Cronin, Sergeant Joaquim DeBarros, and Officers Joseph Morales and Angel Llanos).
In February 2025, U.S. District Judge Kari A. Dooley ruled on both cases within days of each other — first Brenda Lee Rawls’ case (Washington v. City of Bridgeport, No. 3:23-CV-01607), then Lauren’s, in a companion opinion the court explicitly noted “draw[s] considerably” from the Rawls decision given the overlapping allegations. The court’s opinion in Lauren’s case, like the one in Rawls’, explicitly states that its decision “does not require the Court to evaluate or opine on the conduct of the police officers… or to vindicate either party’s position on the merits” — in other words, this was not a ruling on whether misconduct occurred.
Several claims in Lauren’s case were dismissed on grounds distinct from Rawls’. Claims Shantell Fields brought as administrator of Lauren’s estate — for alleged mistreatment occurring after Lauren’s death — were dismissed with prejudice, on the same legal theory as in the Rawls case: a deceased person has no ongoing civil rights to be violated. The court also found that the complaint largely failed to distinguish between the five individually named officers — four of them, the opinion notes, “appear only once in the entire Amended Complaint,” named only as parties with no specific conduct attributed to them individually. Of the five, only Cronin had any specific factual allegations tied to him personally: the December 13 phone call, and hanging up on the family.
The court also noted something almost paradoxical: Mayor Joe Ganim’s own public apology and the suspension of two officers — actions that felt, at the time, like accountability — were cited by the court as evidence against the idea that Bridgeport had an official policy or pattern of discrimination, since publicly treating the conduct as individual failures undercut the very municipal “policy or custom” claim the family needed to establish.
As with Rawls’ case, the core equal-protection and Title VI civil rights claims against the City were dismissed as “wholly conclusory” — again citing the demanding Monell standard requiring proof of a citywide pattern, not a single case. Unlike Rawls’ case, Lauren’s civil rights claims were dismissed without prejudice, meaning the family retained the option to file a further amended complaint by a March 2025 deadline.
Separately, the complaint’s claims directly against Bumble and Matthew LaFountain — negligence and wrongful death, respectively — never proceeded on their merits: court records show neither party was ever formally served with the lawsuit, and neither ever appeared in the case.
In June 2026, the Bridgeport City Council approved a settlement in Lauren’s case: $30,000 — a fraction of the $30 million originally sought. Brenda Lee Rawls’ family received nothing; their case had already been dismissed.
What Did Change
Despite the outcome of the litigation, Lauren and Brenda’s deaths did produce lasting policy change in Connecticut.
Following public testimony from both families — including Shantell Fields telling lawmakers, “When it comes to Black and brown people, you need to treat us like we’re human” — the Connecticut legislature passed House Bill 5349, codified as Conn. Gen. Stat. § 7-294mm, which took effect October 1, 2022. The law requires police departments to notify a deceased person’s next of kin within 24 hours of identifying the body, or to document the reason for any delay. It empowers the state’s Inspector General to investigate violations and recommend discipline, up to and including decertification of the responsible officer.
In 2024, Connecticut enacted a second law directly connected to Lauren’s case: Public Act 23-56, which requires dating app operators doing business in the state to maintain an accessible “online safety center” within their platforms, including clear mechanisms for reporting harassment, direct links to domestic violence and sexual assault resources, and information on romance scams. Companies that fail to comply face fines of up to $25,000 per violation. Lawmakers explicitly cited Lauren’s case — alongside the case of Emily Todd, an Ohio woman murdered by a man she met on a dating app — as motivation for the law.
Where This Leaves Us
Lauren Smith-Fields never received a resolution to the questions surrounding her death. No one was ever charged in connection with it. The evidence that might have answered those questions — a DNA sample, tested glassware, a properly processed crime scene — was simply never collected. What remains is an official ruling of accidental death, a family’s enduring and unresolved suspicion that something more happened, and a legal system that, for entirely procedural reasons, was never able to determine which of those is true.
What can be said with certainty is this: the failures in this case were not confined to a single bad night, or a single indifferent officer. They extended across weeks of inaction, years of litigation, and — as internal affairs records eventually confirmed — a level of institutional negligence that outpaced even what the family had originally alleged. And the timeline of accountability here is not a matter of decades past. The internal affairs findings became public in 2024. The federal court ruling came in 2025. The settlement was finalized in 2026 — this year.
This is not a cold case from another era. It is a very recent illustration of how a death investigation can fail — quietly, procedurally, almost entirely without anyone ever being required to answer for it.
Vanished Voices is a true crime podcast dedicated to the cases that don’t get the attention they deserve — unsolved cases of people of color, LGBTQ+ victims, MMIW cases, and stories that still need tips to be solved. New episodes drop every Thursday. Subscribe and follow us anywhere. Listen to this episode on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
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Resources:
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Stylist. (2022, January). Lauren Smith-Fields: What we know about her death so far.Lauren Smith-Fields: What we know about her death so far
TheGrio. (2022, January 24). Lauren Smith-Fields’ family to sue city of Bridgeport over death investigation.Lauren Smith-Fields’ family to sue city of Bridgeport over death investigation – TheGrio
TheGrio. (2022, January 25). Lauren Smith-Fields’ cause of death revealed as family prepares to sue city of Bridgeport.Lauren Smith-Fields’ cause of death revealed as family prepares to sue city of Bridgeport – TheGrio
Rabe Thomas, J., & Lockhart, B. (2024, March 28). Families feel left in the dark — again: Cases drew national outrage, headlines 2 years ago when Bridgeport police failed to notify families about deaths. Cheshire Citizen, pp. A15–A17. [NP]
Vice News. (2022, January). Lauren Smith-Fields’ family to sue police over investigation into her death.Lauren Smith-Fields’ Family to Sue Police Over Investigation Into Her Death
Washington v. City of Bridgeport, No. 3:23-CV-01607 (KAD) (D. Conn. Feb. 20, 2025) (memorandum of decision re: motion to dismiss). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10336730/washington-v-city-of-bridgeport/
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Death of Lauren Smith-Fields. Wikipedia. Death of Lauren Smith-Fields – Wikipedia
WTNH. (2022, January 25). Bridgeport police open criminal investigation into death of TikTok influencer Lauren Smith-Fields. Bridgeport police open criminal investigation into death of TikTok influencer Lauren Smith-Fields
YourTango. (2022, January 26). Who is Matthew LaFountain? Lauren Smith-Fields Bumble date not yet investigated by police. Who Is Matthew LaFountain? Lauren Smith-Fields Bumble Date Not Yet Investigated By Police | YourTango