Two years ago, failures by Bridgeport Police to notify families about the deaths of two Black women drew national outrage and headlines.
Mayor Joe Ganim called the delayed notifications and investigations “unacceptable.” He promised accountability and to do right by the families of Lauren Smith-Fields and Brenda Lee Rawls.
But in the 25 months since, families of both women say police and city officials have provided them with scant updates about the death investigations, stonewalled requests for records and answered few questions as they seek closure.
The families say city officials did not even tell them police closed both death investigations more than a year ago.
What’s more, scathing reports CT Insider recently obtained from Bridgeport Police describe how the department’s internal investigators found detectives failed to promptly and properly notify the families about the deaths. One of the reports also faulted the lead investigator of one case for failing to properly investigate that death.
When told by a CT Insider reporter during a recent interview that the investigation into her daughter’s death had closed, Shantell Fields began crying uncontrollably.
“They never told us they closed it,” said Smith-Fields’ brother, Lakeem Jetter. “They just kept putting on a show. It’s all smoke and mirrors.”
Dorothy Washington, the sister of Rawls, was in disbelief. “So they don’t tell the family when the case is closed?”
The state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. James R. Gill, whose office completed their autopsies, declined to speak about either of these cases specifically.
But, Gill spoke to CT Insider in broad terms about the death determination process his office goes through. He said it relies on the information provided by his inspectors and the police.
However, the manner in which someone died depends on the circumstances surrounding their death. That classification – either accidental, homicide, natural causes, or suicide – relies on what information is given to his medical examiners.
“We need the circumstances. We need the police investigation in order to determine the manner of death,” Gill said during an interview. “Someone who does an autopsy in a vacuum, is kind of doomed to failure. They're gonna miss things. You really need the circumstances.”
Take, for example, determining if someone died from an accidental overdose versus being drugged.
“So if we had that information, that someone intentionally gave someone too much drugs to harm them, we would call it a homicide. The autopsy is not going to tell us that. We need the investigation,” he said.
In the Rawls’ case,
internal investigators found the only detective assigned, Angel Llanos “had not written a report until he was ordered to do so” 15 days after the death. That report is supposed to outline what the detective witnessed and investigated on the scene.
Upon receiving that incident report, his boss Lt. Christopher LaMaine told internal affairs that “the most overwhelming thing that stands out is the lack of content. He (Llanos) didn’t do anything. … It was just laziness, and you can’t train away laziness”
