Two women died on the same day in Bridgeport, and their families are still waiting for answers

First, it was the city’s failure to inform each family that the two Black women had died in separate incidents in the city on the same day in December 2021. That lack of notification led to national outrage and a change in state law last year that requires such notification within 24 hours.

Now, the families are waiting for the department to provide public records they believe would help them make sense of the untimely deaths, whether foul play was involved and if the police response and investigations were adequate.

Persistent follow-ups with city officials have so far produced no records.

“We’ve gotten nothing, nothing at all,” said Shantell Fields, the mother of Lauren Smith-Fields, who died 14 months ago. “It is a rotten apple inside the police department over there. … They told us to stop calling. ‘It’s an open investigation.’”

The city declined interview requests and did not answer specific questions about the delays in providing records to either family.

But in a statement about the city’s overall performance providing public records, officials said they are working to improve their response times. Hours after Hearst Connecticut Media published this story online Thursday, Mayor Joe Ganim announced plans to “remove the bottleneck delay.”

The families’ pending requests are part of a growing backlog of unfulfilled requests for public records filed under the state’s Freedom of Information Act with the city of Bridgeport.

As of November, the number of outstanding requests to the city topped 2,000, a Hearst Connecticut Media investigation found. The city, despite prior pledges from Ganim to improve transparency, has developed a reputation for delays and stonewalling and been found by state officials to have violated the state’s open records law far more often than other cities. Most such violations involved requests for police records.

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Fields said until she gets the records she requested from Bridgeport police, she will be unable to trust that the city did an adequate investigation — or any at all.

“I want to do my own investigation,” Fields said.

Among the records Fields and her attorney are waiting on are 911 recordings from the day her daughter died, phone records of the detectives who responded to the scene and a copy of an internal affairs investigation the department completed six months ago into the officers’ handling of the case. 

In its effort to inform readers and the public through coverage about both cases, Hearst Connecticut Media has been waiting for copies of those same internal affairs reports for seven months, and for internal affairs reports into officers’ handling of Rawls’ case for eight months. 

As national media attention on these cases grew, Bridgeport police announced they were opening a criminal investigation, with assistance from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, into the Smith-Fields case six weeks after her death.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the cause of her death to be “acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, promethazine, hydroxyzine, and alcohol,” and the manner to be accidental. 

One year later, Fields has questions about what happened, doubts about how active the criminal investigation is and whether the department is using that as an excuse not to release the records.

“I have to know: Was she there struggling to live when 911 was called or was a detective at the police department called before an ambulance?” she said. “I haven’t been able to know.”

A Bridgeport Police Department spokesman told Hearst Connecticut Media they closed both women’s untimely death investigations but, in connection with Smith-Fields’ death, the criminal narcotics investigation case they are working with the DEA remains open.

Rawls was found dead in Bridgeport on the same day Smith-Fields died. The state medical examiner later ruled she died due to natural causes.

Her family members said they still have questions about the circumstances around her death and are still waiting for more information from the police that may give them closure. They said they regularly visit the police department’s records division to ask for updates on their requests for records, including any documents about the investigation into her death.

“We figure the report should be complete by now,” Rawls' sister, Dorothy Washington, said of her family’s visit to the department in December on the one-year anniversary of Rawls' death. “How did the investigation go? Was there an investigation? We have no more information than the day that it happened.”

The attorney of the two families, Darnell Crosland, who is preparing a case to sue the city for the mishandling of the death of Smith-Fields and Rawls, said it’s long past time for the city to improve. He said he’s seen the city delay providing public records to Bridgeport families he’s represented many times over the years.

“A lack of transparency within the (police) department in Bridgeport only goes to hurt the overall mission of what the police department says that they stand for — which is to get to the bottom of investigations,” he said.

On Thursday, after this story published online, the city said it plans to train staff in each department by mid-March on how to process records requests to phase out its practice of funneling requests through the city attorney’s office, which generated a growing backlog.

"This new procedure will reduce unnecessary middleman delay, which the FOI Commission has indicated will no longer be tolerated,” Janene W. Hawkins, the city’s chief administrator, wrote in a letter to department heads. Hawkins said the move means Bridgeport will begin “responding to FOI requests in the same manner customarily utilized by other Connecticut municipalities.”

Under the new plan, residents will also be able to make requests directly to the department they’re seeking records from, rather than going through the city attorney’s office. The backlog of about 2,000 open records requests will also be re-routed to departments with those records.

Washington said she isn’t hopeful the changes will help her get the records and some closure.

“I can’t trust them. I can’t trust [that] the police department is going to release the records either,” she said during an interview after the announcement was made. “I am not optimistic about putting it into their hands.”

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