On December 12, 2021, 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Fields was found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut apartment, the morning after a first date with a man she'd matched with on Bumble. Her family wasn't notified by police — they found out from a note taped to her door, left by her landlord, that pointed them to him, not to police.

What followed was weeks of uncollected evidence, a detective who hung up on a grieving family and told them to stop calling — twice, a month apart — and a rape kit that was never performed at all.

Then there's the detail that could have answered everything: the man with her that night told police they didn't have sex. In her bathroom trash can was a used condom, with semen that hadn't dried. Nobody ever tested it. Nobody ever will.

This episode traces the full story of Lauren's case: the night of her death, the investigation that barely happened, the eerily parallel case of Brenda Lee Rawls — another Black woman who died in Bridgeport that same day — and the years-long legal fight that followed.

We cover the internal affairs records that surfaced years later, the federal court ruling that reshaped both families' cases, and the two Connecticut laws that exist today because of what happened to Lauren.

This isn't a cold case from decades past. The internal affairs findings came out in 2024. The federal ruling came in 2025. The settlement was finalized in 2026 — this year. Lauren Smith-Fields' story is proof that these failures aren't history. They're still happening.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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