 It was December 12, 2021, and Chantel Fields had not been able to get a hold of her daughter, Lauren Smith Fields, all day. She sent various texts and called multiple times, only to be met with radio silence. The following day, Chantel and her son headed over to Lauren's apartment where they were met with a note on the door that said, if you're looking for Lauren, call this number. As soon as Mrs. Fields called the number, Lauren's landlord came downstairs to meet her. The landlord had the heartbreaking task of informing Chantel that her beloved daughter had passed away the day before. The Bridgeport Police Department was already aware of this, but they never bothered to call Lauren's family to break the news. The landlord gave Chantel's son the phone number of a detective who informed him that Lauren had met a man on a dating app and she'd spent the evening with him before losing her life. The detective never told the family what had happened, never offered any details and abruptly hung up the call without so much as an explanation. Lauren's family had to beg detectives for days on end just to show up and collect evidence from the scene of the crime. By all accounts, the investigators could not have cared less about Lauren's case. They made virtually no attempts to follow up on various leads and they wrote off the man who was with her the moment she passed away, saying he was a nice guy, only speaking with him one time for a few brief moments at the scene of the crime. Worse yet, police labeled her case as no need for investigation. But what would have led the Bridgeport Police to have been so careless, so heartless and utterly unconcerned? Well get ready because this one's a doozy. Lauren Smith Fields was a 23-year-old woman who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She'd been a student at the Norwalk Community College and was pursuing her dreams of becoming a physical therapist. Lauren was known for being an outgoing woman with a bubbly personality and she had a deep love for her family, the fashion industry and traveling. On the evening of December 11th, 2021, Lauren had invited over a man that she just recently met named Matthew LaFountain or LaFontaine, depending on which sources you read. Matthew was a man who was several years older than Lord and the two had met on a dating app called Bumble. The two had only known each other for a few days, but Lauren had invited Matthew over to her apartment to share a few drinks and play games, generally getting to know one another better. The two spent the majority of the evening drinking tequilla, watching movies and seeing where the evening would take them. As the evening rolled on, Lauren eventually stepped outside to meet with her brother to give him back a basket of clothes that he left behind. When she returned to the apartment, she went to the bathroom for around 15 minutes, then returned to the living room couch where she and Matthew had been watching a movie. Before long, she fell asleep on the couch. Matthew finished watching the movie while Lauren slept and when the credits rolled, he picked her up and carried her to bed, falling asleep beside her just a few minutes later. But there is an alternate version of events that was shared by Lauren's family and it's difficult to understand which version of the story aligns more closely with reality. Lauren's family claims that Lauren had been feeling ill all afternoon and when Matthew came over, Lauren was already sick. According to Lauren's family, as soon as she returned to her apartment after meeting with her brother, she began to vomit uncontrollably, leading her to enter the bathroom for the aforementioned 15 minutes. After this, Lauren's family claims that she was immediately carried to bed by Matthew rather than returning to the couch and falling asleep. Regardless of which line of events is more accurate, Matthew says that he went to bed a short while later and woke up around 3 AM and he heard Lauren snoring in bed next to him. He fell asleep again a few short moments later and after this, the evening took an incredibly dark turn. Matthew was completely unprepared for what he would wake up to just three and a half hours later. For Lauren's family, life would never be the same. A seemingly ordinary night shared between friends was about to turn into a tragedy that no one would soon forget, leaving behind yet another dating-at-murder mystery for friends and family to unravel. Before we keep going with today's story, I've got to ask you guys a question. As we're all getting older, have you started to notice that your skin isn't quite as vibrant as it once was? 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My favorite thing about Biotrust, though, is that you can mix this supplement with water or even put it in your coffee or any other drink of your choice. It doesn't have that awful, bitter, earthy flavor that other supplements have. It's actually quite delicious. Kind of as a pumpkin spice sort of vibe, it's actually pretty great. Click the link below to get up to 51% off your order and you'll even get free shipping. If you're a bit hesitant to try out Biotrust, well, don't be because they're even throwing in a 60-day money-back guarantee on top of all this. So give it a shot and let me know what you think, but let's get back to the story. And thanks to Biotrust for sponsoring today's video. Matthew would wake up a few hours later at 6.30 a.m. He expected to roll over and find Lauren smiling back at him after an evening of fun and games, but that wasn't at all what he encountered. As he rolled over it to tell Lauren good morning, he quickly realized that she wasn't breathing. A small amount of red liquid was dripping from her right nostril and that's when he began to panic. Matthew immediately called the police and the emergency call operator on the other end of the line helped provide Matthew with instructions on how to provide CPR, but it was all to no avail. By the time first responders arrived at the scene, Lauren was already gone. There was nothing Matthew could have done to save her. When officers arrived, they questioned Matthew for a few brief moments. They explained what had happened and how he'd woken up to find that Lauren wasn't breathing and that's about as far as the conversation went. The police collected Lauren's phone, her keys, her passport and over $1,000 in cash that she kept in her apartment, then gathered up Lauren and left. That was the end of the story. They didn't collect any evidence, no additional witness statements from her neighbors, nothing. The worst part is that they made it no attempts to even contact Lauren's family. It would take Lauren's mother more than 24 hours to learn that her daughter had even lost her life and it wasn't even the police who revealed this information to her. Now, just to paint a clear picture of how the situation would typically unfold, police won't rarely reach out to family immediately. It's not uncommon at all for police to take a few hours to collect whatever answers they can before informing a family member about the passing of a loved one. The only thing worse than finding out that someone you loved passed away is to hear this news from an investigator followed by a million responses of I don't know when you begin to ask questions. So it's not uncommon for officers to follow up on a couple potential leads or at least gather a few witness statements before calls are made. But in Lauren's case, police seem to have had no intentions of informing her family any day soon. And it wasn't even because they were actively investigating the case. They made no attempts whatsoever to get to the bottom of what had taken place with Lauren. They simply collected her body, placed her in the morgue and got to work investigating other crimes. When Lauren's family arrived at her apartment to check on her the following day, they found the aforementioned note on her door that redirected them to the landlord. The landlord, believe it or not, was the one who had to break the news to Lauren's family about her unexpected passing. Lauren's family then immediately reached out to the Bridgeport Police Department and they were directed to Detective Kevin Cronin, the detective who had arrived at Lauren's apartment on the morning of her passing. Detective Cronin explained the situation to the family, how Lauren had been on a date with Matthew and how Matthew had found her unresponsive in bed the following morning. Lauren's family obviously had a million questions. So Detective Cronin explained that he would head straight over to Lauren's apartment to speak with them, claiming he would be there in 30 minutes. After 45 minutes passed by, Detective Cronin never showed up and when Lauren's family tried to call him back later that day, he hung up on them, explaining that he'd already told them everything he knew. When Lauren's family was finally able to get ahold of the apartment once again, the officer they spoke with confirmed that Lauren had been on a date the evening she lost her life, but the officer explained that the man that she'd been seeing was quote, a really nice guy and that there was no need to investigate the situation any further. But let's be real for a moment, in what world is this okay? At this point, detectives didn't even know how Lauren had lost her life. They just assumed it was either an accident or an overdose, but they had no reason to believe such a thing as they'd collected no evidence. The only statement they had taken from the scene of the crime was from the man who very well could have been her killer. Now, to be painfully clear here, police say they had no reason to suspect Matthew was lying or that he had any involvement in Lauren losing her life. In no way am I suggesting that Matthew was responsible, but without so much as a second statement, how do we know he wasn't lying? Police say that Matthew was a really nice guy and that he didn't give appearances of being a criminal, but neither did Ted Bundy, neither did Jeffrey Dahmer or Dennis Rader. Now, again, I'm not suggesting even for a moment that Matthew is hiding anything. I'm merely saying that someone should have questioned him further or at the very least, taken other statements from neighbors, friends, family or something, but they didn't. And officers clearly could not have cared any less if they had tried. Chantel Fields, Lauren's mother, decided that if police weren't going to investigate the case, then she would have to do it herself. She headed back over to Lauren's apartment and that's when she found evidence to suggest that Lauren had Matthew had been intimately involved on the night that she lost her life. I find this particular aspect of the story pretty strange because if Lauren's family claims that Lauren had been feeling ill all afternoon long before Matthew arrived, why would she and Matthew have been drinking, partying and eventually being intimate with one another? That just doesn't make sense to me. If she was sick, she certainly wouldn't have felt up to this kind of behavior. But things get a bit more strange when Chantel found the blood on Lauren's sheets. Now, we don't know if this came from her nose as mentioned a moment ago, nor do we know the quantity that was found, but we know that it was enough to cause Lauren's mother to be incredibly concerned, especially considering police hadn't bothered to collect the sheets as evidence. But when she found a mysterious pill nearby as well, well, that's when she knew that there was more to this story than meets the eye. Chantel called the police back and informed them about the evidence that she had found at the scene of the crime. But still, investigators were unconcerned. While they did eventually collect these items from Lauren's apartment, police didn't submit the items into evidence or even bother sending them in for forensic testing until over a month later. Now, to clarify, I'm not saying it took that long to get the results back from testing. I'm saying it took them this long to even bother filing the paperwork to submit the items in the first place. After another two weeks, the results of Lauren's toxicology test had finally come back in, this being a total of six weeks after she lost her life. The results showed that Lauren had passed away from an overdose of anhystamines, alcohol, and fentanyl. Now, before we keep going, I need to make it clear that I'm not a doctor any form of medical professional, but there's something interesting that I noticed about this toxicology report. To be more specific about what was found in Lauren's system, investigators say that they found traces of promethazine, hydroxyzine, alcohol, and fentanyl. Hydroxyzine is a pretty typical anhystamine. It's taken for allergies to help people sleep and some people even take it for anxiety. But promethazine is a pretty interesting one in this particular case. Promethazine is what's commonly found in prescription cough syrup. Prior to about 2017 or so, you could buy this stuff over the counter and it was often mixed with Kodi. But the over-the-counter sale of codeine was restricted in the United States just a few years ago and promethazine disappeared along with it. The reason this is interesting is because cough syrup that contains codeine and promethazine is often used as a party drug known as a purple drink or lean or several other street names. But this is interesting in Lauren's case because the toxicology report made no mention of codeine being found in her system, only promethazine. The whole point of purple drink is the codeine, not the promethazine. Codeine is known for getting you high, numbing pain and generally making you feel copacetic. Without codeine, promethazine is pretty dang useless, at least in terms of street usage. All it'll do is put you to sleep, not something you want when you're partying like Lauren was. So this begs the question, why was Lauren taking so many sleeping medications the night that she lost her life? Now, this is just my opinion, but if Lauren planned on staying up all night and partying with her new boyfriend, why would she have taken so many sleeping pills or any at all for that matter? This leads to the obvious follow-up question of where did they all come from and where did the fentanyl come from? Also, what about the mysterious pill that Chantelle found that was never identified? Nothing that was found in Lauren's system would have had any sort of partying effect outside of the alcohol, obviously. Without the codeine, Lauren wouldn't have been having a particularly good time that evening. She would have just been asleep. She would have been out cold within minutes of taking all of this. Now, again, this is just my opinion, but this toxicology report kind of looks like Lauren may have been drugged. It honestly sounds like someone wanted to get this poor girl unconscious and quickly. After the complete disrespect from the Bridgeport Police Department, Lauren's family resorted to hiring an attorney, Darnell Crossland. Crossland very quickly took to the media and explained that he had never heard of a medical examiner concluding that someone died accidentally while taking drugs without ever bothering to find out where the drugs came from or how they were ingested, especially in relation to a woman who had no prior history of drug use. Lauren's family backed up these statements, explaining that Lauren would have never taken anything that wasn't prescribed. She lived on a plant-based diet, watched what she ate, and was in incredibly good shape, as is evidenced by all of her photos. She went to the gym nearly every day and took great care of herself. Her brother also came forward and recalled the night of Lauren's passing. If you remember, he stopped by to pick up a basket of clothes from her just hours before she lost her life. Her brother says that she wasn't drunk, nor did she show any signs of being out of sorts. She was her typical usual self. Lauren's family and friends eventually banded together and formed multiple protests in the city of Bridgeport. As a result of their efforts, Detective Cronin was suspended from service and placed on paid leave, also known as a free vacation. He returned to duty in May of that year without any further repercussions. The complete lack of care and repeated displays of disrespect in this case are utterly appalling. As it stands, no further updates have taken place in Lauren's case since 2022. After repeated appeals by her family, her case was reassigned to a different group of investigators, but there's been no indication that they've made any progress either. As it stands, we have no answers regarding how such a clean-cut woman could have passed away from a drug overdose just days after meeting this new man on Bumble. Now, I'm not a person that likes to throw blame at someone without some form of evidence, so I'm certainly not blaming Lauren's boyfriend for her demise. But at the very least, the man should have been investigated. I mean, really, if I woke up to find my wife who had allegedly passed away in bed beside me overnight, I would expect to be very thoroughly investigated. I would be truly concerned if I wasn't, so why was this man getting a pass simply because he seemed like a nice guy on the surface? Someone gave Lauren the drugs that caused her to lose her life. Someone knew what was in them, so why is this person not being held responsible? Worse yet, we don't even know how Lauren ingested these drugs. Were they given to her in the form of a pill similar to the one that Chantel found in Lauren's apartment? Were they mixed into her drink while she was in the bathroom for those 15 minutes? We don't know, and at this rate, we never will. This is yet another dating app murder mystery that police just don't want to get solved, and this seems to be a trend these days. So did this dating app reveal her killer? Was Matthew the man responsible? I mean, who even knows at this point? I certainly hope that one day, Lauren's case will be solved. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that in all honesty, though, I don't think it will be. The Bridgeport police have made their stance very clear they don't care. Our only hope at this point is that Lauren's family lawyer will be able to find some sort of evidence to hold the police force accountable for their complete disregard in getting justice for Lauren. And maybe at the end of it all, someone will be able to catch the person who's responsible for all this. Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of True Crime Stories. If you wanna see more true crime documentaries like this, be sure to hit the like button and subscribe. 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