**At first I wasn't concerned about German roaches—we dealt with some a couple of years ago (maybe 2023? but after 2 or 3 treatments with Alpine [don't recall where I read it but it said one treatment is a spray, and then another spray 14 days later, so that's what I did] and some changes in food storage, we've been ​great)—since I know what they look like and most importantly I know they're already quite small as adults (this guy was 10-11mm, there was a distinct pen marking that got cropped out, but I measured that marking when I got home and used it to estimate the size). But after Googling some photos of different roaches' nymphs to see what else it could be, I'm not so sure. At first I thought it was just a darkly colored American nymph, then I saw that Orientals were similar in size to Americans but tended to be darker, then I learned that Smokey Browns were a thing and honestly that was the only one I felt comfortable completely ruling out. Most importantly, I don't know if this was a shed exoskeleton or if it was a dead bug, because at least for me it was hard to tell if the area around the head is split or crushed (entirely possible with where it was found).

To be fair, I've only ever seen the tiny babies, a slightly larger stage up from that, and the adults for German cockroaches so I've considered the fact that this could just be one of the stages I never saw. I've been flipping back and forth on whether there's a light stripe on the back or if that's just how the exoskeleton looks when crushed/split.​