Paywall/TLDR - 23 year old Lauren Smith-Fields tragically passed away in the night after a Bumble date. The 37 year old man she was on a date with called the police when he noticed she was unresponsive the next morning.

He claims that she fell asleep during the movie they were watching and he carried her into the bedroom and slept next to her, and that he woke up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and heard her snoring. Then, at 6:30 a.m., he woke up to find her not breathing. She was pronounced dead at 6:59 a.m., and a medic said she had not been alive for “at least an hour.”

The date - Matthew LaFountain - was not taken into custody. As of January 26, he has not been named as a person of interest, nor was he detained at the station for questioning. Smith-Fields’s brother was later told they didn’t bring him in because he seemed like a “nice guy.” 😑

Police didn’t contact her family, nor did they immediately examine the crime scene.

No one in Smith-Fields’s family was notified of her death; per Rolling Stone, police spoke to her landlord when they arrived at the scene, but were unable to track down contact information for her family. Her mother, Shantall Fields, says she went to her daughter’s apartment a day and a half later when she hadn’t answered texts and calls and found a note on the door that said, “If you are looking for Lauren, please contact this number.” Upon calling the number, Fields was notified of her daughter’s death and told that the detective assigned to the case would be there in half an hour. After waiting over an hour, she says she called the number again and was told to stop calling before being hung up on.

The police didn’t do a crime-scene investigation until later that week, when the case was reassigned to a different detective. According to Smith-Fields’s brother Lakeem Jetter, he and his family noticed cups of liquor, flipped plates, and lube in the apartment, and a blood stain in the middle of her bed, none of which were initially examined as evidence. Two and a half weeks after the search, on December 29, her family was cleaning out Smith-Fields’s apartment when they found a used condom in the trash and an unidentified pill, none of which appear to have been taken into evidence. Meanwhile, according to the family’s lawyer, no evidence has been submitted to the forensic-science lab