In the fading industrial heart of New Britain, Connecticut—a city of weathered brick rowhouses, bustling taquerias, and resilient immigrant communities where dreams often clash with daily hardships—a grim discovery has peeled back layers of familial deception and unspoken cruelty. On October 8, 2025, at the edge of an overgrown lot behind a boarded-up Victorian on Clark Street, a plastic storage bin—its lid secured with duct tape and weathered by rain—yielded a secret that had festered for over a year. Inside, wrapped in trash bags and shrouded in the musty scent of neglect, lay the skeletal remains of 11-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia, a girl whose laughter once echoed through school hallways but whose final days were silenced by starvation and isolation. Newly unsealed search warrants, obtained by Farmington police and released on October 28, paint a harrowing portrait of abuse: a mother who confessed to withholding food for weeks, an aunt who witnessed the horrors but did nothing, and a boyfriend who allegedly orchestrated the punishments. Yet, in a chilling omission, the four other children in the household—two from Karla Garcia’s union with Jonatan Nanita and two from her previous relationships—were seemingly untouched by the spotlight of suffering, their silence a stark testament to the selective shadows of family dysfunction.

New Britain, with its population of roughly 74,000, has long been a mosaic of Puerto Rican, Italian, and Polish heritage, where factory whistles once summoned shifts at the American-Connecticut Corporation and now give way to the hum of Little League games and bodega chatter. Clark Street, in the city’s North End, is a forgotten artery lined with sagging porches and chain-link fences, a place where abandoned properties squat like ghosts amid the occasional burst of marigold from a resident’s defiant garden. The house at 80 Clark Street, a dilapidated two-story with peeling green paint and shattered windows, had stood vacant for years, its yard a tangle of weeds and discarded tires. It was here, prompted by an anonymous 911 call reporting “suspicious activity”—a man unloading heavy bins under cover of dusk—that officers from the New Britain Police Department pried open the container. The air escaped in a foul rush, and what they found inside would unravel a narrative of calculated cruelty spanning two towns and an entire year.

Jacqueline Torres-Garcia, affectionately called Mimi by those who knew her spark, was born on January 29, 2014, in Hartford, the youngest of Karla Garcia’s five children. With her wide brown eyes, curly dark hair often tied in playful pigtails, and a penchant for drawing fantastical creatures in her notebooks, Mimi embodied the unfiltered joy of childhood. School records from New Britain Public Schools show her as a bright, if occasionally withdrawn, student from kindergarten through fifth grade at Slade Middle School, where she excelled in art class and joined a after-school dance group. Teachers recall her as “the girl with the infectious giggle,” the one who’d share her crayons without hesitation. But by the summer of 2024, as the family relocated from a cramped apartment in New Britain to a rented split-level on Wellington Drive in nearby Farmington—a suburb of tidy lawns and colonial homes—Mimi’s world contracted into a nightmare of confinement and deprivation.

The warrants, spanning 47 pages of affidavits and forensic summaries, detail a regimen of abuse that escalated from verbal barbs to physical torment, all under the roof shared with her four siblings. Karla Garcia, 29, a part-time home health aide with a history of unstable employment, and her boyfriend Jonatan Nanita, 30, a warehouse laborer with a prior arrest for domestic disturbance, admitted to investigators that they ceased feeding Mimi around early September 2024. “She was acting out,” Garcia reportedly told detectives during a voluntary interview on October 9, her voice flat as she described zip-tying the girl’s wrists and ankles to a bedframe as “discipline.” For two weeks, Mimi survived—if it can be called that—on sips of water and scraps begged from her siblings, her small frame wasting away in a corner of the basement bedroom. Photos recovered from Jackelyn Garcia’s phone, Karla’s 28-year-old sister who lived with the family intermittently, show the child curled on “pee pads” like an animal, her clothes soiled, eyes hollowed by hunger. “She’d cry for food, but we told her no,” Jackelyn confessed in her own statement, adding that she believed Mimi “was going to die” even as she packed her bags to move out in August 2024.

The autopsy, conducted by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Farmington on October 9, confirmed what the skeletal evidence suggested: death by malnutrition and neglect, with no blunt force trauma or toxins present. Mimi’s body, measuring just 4 feet 2 inches and weighing a mere 45 pounds at discovery—down from 68 pounds in her last school physical—weighed heavy with signs of prolonged starvation. Ribs protruded like piano keys, her skin parchment-thin over fragile bones, and ligature marks scarred her wrists from repeated restraints. Dental records and DNA from a hairbrush in the family home matched the remains unequivocally. Investigators believe she perished on or around September 19, 2024, alone in that basement while the household above carried on. The body, zipped into a duffel and later transferred to the plastic bin, was stored in the basement freezer for months, then the garage as the weather warmed, before Nanita allegedly hauled it to a cemetery in New Britain, wrapped it further, and dumped it at Clark Street during the family’s move in late September 2025.

What chills the blood in these documents is the invisibility of Mimi amid her siblings’ normalcy. Karla Garcia shares two children—a 4-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl—with Nanita, both described in warrants as “well-nourished and developmentally on track.” Two older half-siblings from Garcia’s prior relationship, ages 9 and 7, attended local schools without incident, their report cards tucked into family albums while Mimi’s were discarded. None of the warrants mention reports of abuse extending to these children; in fact, social workers who visited the home in July 2024 for a routine welfare check noted “no red flags,” praising the “lively family dynamic” after observing the older kids playing board games upstairs. Jackelyn Garcia, in her interview, admitted to photographing Mimi’s punishments but insisted, “It was just her—they didn’t touch the others.” Psychologists consulting on the case theorize a pattern of “scapegoating,” where one child absorbs the family’s frustrations—perhaps Mimi’s “acting out” stemmed from undiagnosed ADHD or the trauma of her parents’ volatile relationship—leaving her siblings in a bubble of denial. “The other kids didn’t acknowledge her existence toward the end,” one warrant notes, quoting a neighbor who saw the family at a park barbecue in August 2024, where Mimi sat apart, untouched by the shared pizza slices.

The unraveling began with that anonymous tip on October 8—a voice distorted by fear, claiming a “weird guy” had been “dumping trash” at the abandoned house. Patrol officers arrived to find the bin partially buried under leaves, its contents spilling a grim confirmation. Farmington detectives, leading the probe due to the death’s origin, traced the Acura SUV seen on neighborhood cameras back to Nanita, whose phone GPS logged the Clark Street stop at 11:47 p.m. on September 28. Confronted at their new rental in New Britain—a nondescript duplex off Corbin Avenue—Garcia and Nanita initially stonewalled, but cracks appeared. Garcia, tears streaming as she clutched a family photo excluding Mimi, confessed the withholding and restraints, blaming Nanita’s “short fuse.” Nanita, in a separate interrogation, pointed the finger back: “Karla handled the punishments—I just moved the bin because she asked.” He claimed ignorance of the contents until the smell “got bad” during the move. Jackelyn, arrested at her job as a cashier in a Bristol convenience store, corroborated the abuse but minimized her role: “I sent the photos to show Karla how bad it was, but she laughed it off.”

Arrests followed swiftly on October 13: Garcia and Nanita on first-degree murder with special circumstances, conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with evidence, and multiple child cruelty counts, each held on $5 million bonds. Jackelyn faced first-degree unlawful restraint, risk of injury to a minor, and intentional cruelty, her $1 million bail a fraction reflecting her peripheral involvement. All three were arraigned in New Britain Superior Court on October 14, their faces gaunt under fluorescent lights as public defenders entered not-guilty pleas. The courtroom, packed with reporters and a smattering of tearful relatives, heard prosecutors vowing a “watertight case” built on confessions, forensics, and deleted texts recovered from seized iPhones—messages like Garcia’s to Jackelyn: “Mimi’s gone quiet—problem solved?” The warrants also reveal Garcia’s bizarre post-arrest plan: “I was going on a podcast to tell our side,” she told detectives, perhaps envisioning a true-crime redemption arc that now seems macabre.

As the legal gears grind—preliminary hearings set for November 18—the community grapples with ripples of outrage and introspection. New Britain schools, where Mimi’s half-siblings still attend, activated crisis counselors, their backpacks heavier with unspoken questions. A makeshift memorial at Clark Street bloats with teddy bears, faded photos of Mimi in her dance recital tutu, and notes scrawled in crayon: “You deserved better, Mimi.” Vigils draw dozens from Farmington’s Latino enclaves, where pastors from Iglesia de Dios preach on “the sins of silence.” Child welfare advocates, spotlighting Connecticut’s overburdened DCF system—already strained by 1,200 annual abuse investigations—demand audits: How did a family under loose supervision slip through? Mimi’s case echoes national horrors, from the Turpin siblings’ California cage to the Hart family’s Oregon plunge, underscoring how abuse thrives in isolation.

For the four siblings now in foster care—placed with vetted relatives in Hartford—the future is a fragile bridge. Psychological evaluations note “adjustment issues” but no overt trauma, their interviews laced with rehearsed normalcy: “Mimi was always in her room.” Experts urge long-term therapy, fearing delayed fractures. Garcia’s extended family, fractured by the revelations, has rallied quietly; an uncle in Waterbury funds a scholarship in Mimi’s name for at-risk artists, a small light amid the abyss.

In New Britain, as October’s chill bites, the abandoned house on Clark Street looms like a scar, its bin hauled away but the echoes lingering. Warrants have cracked open a door to hell, revealing not just the mechanics of a murder but the quiet complicity that allowed it. Mimi Torres-Garcia, the girl who dreamed in colors, deserved a chorus, not a cover-up. Her story, raw and unresolved, demands we listen harder—to the silences in our own homes, before another child fades into the shadows.