A steady flow of visitors come to place their offerings at the memorial stretched along the front of the abandoned home where the remains of 12-year-old Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres Garcia were found in New Britain, Connecticut on Oct. 14, 2025. Credit: Joe Amon / Connecticut Public

CT Mirror’s independent, nonprofit journalism depends on reader support.
Create more of it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Donate Now

Support trusted local news with a donation today.
Give now for a chance to get your gift MATCHED.

Yes, I’ll give!

The mother of “Mimi” Torres-García acknowledged to police that she had stopped feeding her 11-year-old daughter in the weeks before she died of malnourishment and had restrained her with zip-ties when she was “bad,” according to arrest warrants unsealed Tuesday.

Karla García, the girl’s mother, and her ex-boyfriend, Jonatan Nanita, face multiple charges including murder with special circumstances, risk of injury to a minor, unlawful restraint and intentional cruelty to a child.

Torres-García’s aunt, Jackelyn García, was also charged for her participation in the girl’s abuse.

According to the warrants, two people told police that they had contacted the Department of Children and Families in 2024 and 2025 to express concerns about abuse of the children in the household and the whereabouts of Torres-García.

According to DCF, Torres-García attended medical appointments in November 2022, November 2023 and May 2024.

“During that two-year period, the Department did not receive any reports of child abuse or neglect regarding the family,” according to a DCF statement.

“This is an unspeakable tragedy and one that has impacted Jacqueline’s family, friends, and her entire community,” DCF officials said on Tuesday. “This remains an active and evolving criminal investigation and we will continue to be as transparent as possible following the completion of our review. We continue to ask anyone who has information about this matter to contact law enforcement.”

Torres-García was dead for more than a year before her remains were found in a plastic container in New Britain, the warrants state.

Lawmakers and advocates have demanded answers from DCF about the nature of the department’s involvement in the life of Torres-García and her family and how a DCF employee could have been fooled by a 2025 Zoom call in which the agency said a girl posed as Torres-García during a welfare check.

The case of abuse has also renewed calls for reform of Connecticut’s homeschooling laws, since the lack of required monitoring of homeschooled children made it possible the girl’s mother to cover for her absence from public school during the 2024-2025 school year.

According to the warrants, Karla García admitted to police that during the early weeks of September 2024, when Torres-García would have been attending school, she was being starved and abused until she died. A medical examiner told police that because of ammonia put on the girl’s body to lessen the smell of decomposition, as well as the “lack of subcutaneous fat on the body,” due to severe malnourishment, it was difficult to determine how long Torres-García had been deceased. Her remains weighed only 26 to 27 pounds, according to the warrant.

The arrest warrants include multiple interviews with the girl’s mother, Karla García, aunt, Jackelyn García, and her mother’s ex-boyfriend Jonatan Nanita, who is also the father of Torres-García’s three youngest siblings.

The warrants include an interview with Torres-García’s father, Victor Torres, who told police he’d grown concerned about his eldest daughter’s absence from phone calls and visits he had with her sibling. Torres told police that since June 2024, when he asked to speak with Torres-García, her mother “told him she was not home, or at a Friends, or another excuse.” Torres told police he had moved to Florida in the summer of 2025 but had made trips to New Britain and “every time he tried to visit or talk with his daughters, and/or drop of presents,” and he was allowed to talk to Torres-García’s sibling but not with Torres-García.

He told police he contacted DCF about his daughter’s whereabouts in 2025.

Torres “stated that he grew so concerned that he contacted DCF to do a wellness check but was told they could not because he did not know where she lived,” the warrant states.

A person who lived next door to the family in Farmington in 2024 told police she also called DCF because of concerns about abuse heard through a shared wall. She said that she believed at the time that there was an older boy living in the household but now believes that child was Torres-García after seeing photos of her complexion and curly hair — which she said was short during the time the family lived in Farmington. In a separate interview, the girl’s aunt, Jackelyn García, told police she had cut Torres-García’s hair short after Karla García told her to.

Karla García initially acted surprised during interviews with police that her eldest daughter was not with her four siblings, then told several versions of a violent episode in which her ex-boyfriend Jonatan Nanita was responsible for her death. In a third interview, she admitted to not feeding her eldest daughter for two weeks until she died in bed. During that interview, police confronted García with a report by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which concluded that malnourishment was the likely cause of death. Then García told police that she and Nanita had zip-tied the girl, abused her and starved her before she died.

According to the warrant, “Garcia admitted that Jacqueline died sometime in her bed, but she wasn’t sure exactly when. She stated Nanita came downstairs one day and told her (Karla) that Jacqueline was not breathing anymore. Garcia stated Jonatan moved Jacqueline’s body to the basement, but she never went down there to see what he did with it.”

García also told police that she and Nanita mistreated the girl together “because Jacqueline was ‘bad, she didn’t listen, she didn’t respect them,’” according to the warrant. “García ultimately admitted that they stopped giving Jacqueline food for about two weeks prior to her death.”

Torres-García lived with her paternal grandmother until she was 9 years old, and García and the girl’s father, Victor Torres, had sought guardianship. García eventually got sole custody of the girl, Torres told police.

In the warrants, García told police that “she was hurt from her daughter not wanting her so she would stop talking to her, stop feeding her, and restrain her in zip-ties.”

Jackelyn García, who went to prison in late 2024 for separate child abuse convictions, initially told police that Torres-García and her siblings were “well fed and well dressed,” attended school regularly, that she would get up with them to do their hair and take them to the school bus, and that she had seen Torres-García the morning of the interview.

But during that interview, she was so intoxicated, according to the warrant, that she “stated her pants were wet and that she thought she peed herself.” When confronted with information from García’s former roommate about a photograph that García had shown her of the girl “zip tied, severely malnourished, and laying on dog pee pads to use as a bathroom,” García admitted to the abuse, acknowledged that she had helped zip-tie the girl and was aware that “she suffered malnutrition for a long time.” She also said that she had observed Torres-García being physically beaten.

MEDIA SPECIALIZATION 🔍: The Haunting Echo of a Forgotten Voice

In the fast-paced world of modern journalism, where breaking news cycles demand constant attention and digital algorithms dictate what captures the public’s eye, the art of media specialization has become both a lifeline and a curse. Reporters no longer roam as generalists, casting wide nets across the news landscape; instead, they burrow deep into niches—true crime, political intrigue, environmental disasters—honing expertise that can unearth stories others overlook. But specialization cuts both ways. It sharpens focus, yes, but it also creates blind spots, silos of information where human tragedies can languish unheard. A recent revelation in the world of investigative reporting serves as a stark reminder of this double-edged sword: a forgotten voicemail, left on the phone of a woman whose life ended in mystery, discovered months too late by a reporter who specialized in the very shadows that hid her story.

During a recent interview, investigative journalist Elena Vasquez stumbled upon a chilling artifact from a case she’d long archived. Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia, a 42-year-old single mother from the sun-baked suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, had vanished under suspicious circumstances in the spring of 2024. Mimi wasn’t a celebrity or a public figure; she was an ordinary woman—a paralegal by day, a volunteer at her local community center by night—whose disappearance barely registered on the national radar. Local news outlets covered it briefly, a blip amid the flood of election-year scandals and climate crises. But Vasquez, a specialist in “missing persons cold cases” for the digital outlet Echo Investigations, had taken an interest. Her beat was the forgotten: women of color, low-income families, cases dismissed as runaways or domestic disputes. Specialization, for Vasquez, meant diving into police reports, social media ghosts, and the detritus of lives interrupted.

The interview that changed everything was with Mimi’s estranged brother, Carlos, in a dimly lit coffee shop on the outskirts of Tucson. Carlos, a truck driver with callused hands and a voice roughened by years of silence on family matters, handed over Mimi’s old smartphone—a cracked iPhone 8 that had sat dormant in a drawer since her presumed death. “She always said to keep it charged, just in case,” he muttered, avoiding Vasquez’s eyes. The reporter, ever the specialist, had come prepared with a portable charger and a forensic data extraction kit, tools of her trade honed from years embedding with digital forensics teams. As she powered up the device during a lull in their conversation, the screen flickered to life, notifications dormant but insistent. And then, the voicemail icon pulsed red: one unheard message, timestamped March 15, 2024, the day before Mimi vanished.

Vasquez hit play, the tinny speaker filling the air with static-laced desperation. “Mimi, it’s me… Alex. Please, don’t forget me. I know what they did, and they’re coming for you next. Call back. Please.” The voice was male, young, trembling—cut off by a abrupt hang-up. The message wasn’t heard until October 2025, over 18 months later. Police had never accessed the phone; it was logged as evidence but never cracked open in the rush of more “pressing” cases. Vasquez’s hands shook as she replayed it, the words “Please don’t forget me” echoing like a siren’s call in the quiet café. This wasn’t just a lead; it was a haunting indictment of how specialization in media—and law enforcement—can amplify some voices while muting others to oblivion.

The discovery sent ripples through the specialized corners of true crime journalism. Vasquez’s beat, like many in media specialization, thrives on the granular. General assignment reporters might chase viral TikToks or celebrity feuds, but specialists like her build careers on persistence, on sifting through the 400,000 annual missing persons reports in the U.S. alone (according to the National Crime Information Center). Her platform, Echo Investigations, is part of a growing ecosystem of niche media: podcasts like Crime Junkie delving into forensic psychology, newsletters such as The Vanished aggregating cold cases, and Substack scribes who fundraise for DNA testing. Specialization allows depth—Vasquez, for instance, collaborates with genealogists and AI-driven pattern recognition software to connect dots across decades-old files. But it also fragments the newsroom. In an era of shrinking budgets, outlets like The New York Times or The Guardian assign “beats” so narrow that a story like Mimi’s might fall between cracks: not quite a racial justice piece, not purely a gender violence alert.

Mimi Torres-Garcia’s story exemplifies these fractures. Born in 1982 to Mexican immigrant parents in California’s Central Valley, she moved to Arizona in her twenties seeking stability after a turbulent childhood marked by her father’s deportation. By all accounts, Mimi was resilient: she earned her paralegal certification while raising her daughter, Sofia, now 12, and advocated for immigrant rights at her church. But beneath the surface lurked shadows. Friends later told Vasquez that Mimi had been entangled in a web of local corruption—a real estate scam targeting Latino families, where developers strong-armed sales with veiled threats. “Alex,” the voicemail’s sender, was identified through reverse audio analysis as Alex Rivera, a 28-year-old whistleblower who’d worked as a clerk for one of the firms involved. Rivera had gone missing weeks after leaving the message, his car found abandoned near the Mexican border. Coincidence? Vasquez’s specialized lens screamed no.

In the weeks following the voicemail’s unearthing, Vasquez’s report went viral within niche communities. Her 5,000-word piece on Echo‘s site garnered 2 million views, amplified by true crime influencers on Reddit’s r/UnresolvedMysteries and Twitter threads dissecting the audio waveform for hidden clues. But mainstream media? Crickets, save for a brief CNN segment that pivoted to broader “immigration and crime” tropes, diluting Mimi’s specificity. This is the paradox of media specialization: it empowers storytellers to illuminate the obscure, yet it often confines impact to echo chambers. Data from the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report underscores this—niche outlets see 40% higher engagement rates than generalists, but their reach is 60% smaller. Specialization breeds loyalty among superfans but risks irrelevance in a fragmented attention economy.

Consider the evolution of this trend. In the pre-digital age, journalists like Nellie Bly specialized out of necessity, embedding in asylums or circling the globe to expose systemic ills. The 24/7 news cycle of the ’90s birthed cable specialists—think Bill O’Reilly’s culture wars or Wolf Blitzer’s war rooms. Today, with AI tools like Grok 4 sifting petabytes of data, specialization has hyper-evolved. Reporters use machine learning to predict case trajectories; Vasquez, for example, employs natural language processing to scan 911 transcripts for linguistic “red flags” in missing persons calls. Yet, this tech-fueled depth comes at a cost. The voicemail’s delay wasn’t just bureaucratic— it was symptomatic of overloaded systems. Phoenix PD, stretched thin by opioid epidemics and border surges, prioritizes “high-profile” cases. Media mirrors this: specialized desks drown in tips, leading to triage where a Latina mother’s plea ranks below a tech bro’s startup fraud.

The chilling resonance of “Please don’t forget me” lingers not just in its pathos, but in its broader implications for media ethics. As specialists, are we curators or gatekeepers? Vasquez grappled with this in follow-up interviews, her voice cracking as she described listening to the message alone in her apartment, Sofia’s photo—sent by Carlos—staring back from her desk. “I specialized in forgotten stories to give them voice,” she told Poynter in a meta-reflection. “But what if my focus makes me forget the human behind the file?” Her words echo debates in journalism schools, where curricula now include “niche fatigue” modules, teaching reporters to periodically “cross-pollinate” beats to avoid tunnel vision.

Mimi’s case, reignited by the voicemail, has sparked tentative progress. Vasquez’s reporting prompted Arizona’s Attorney General to reopen the file, allocating funds for Rivera’s dental records to match border remains. Community watchdogs, inspired by Echo‘s model, launched “Mimi’s Network,” a specialized app crowdsourcing tips on similar scams. Yet, the ending remains unresolved—a reminder that specialization, while potent, can’t resurrect the lost. In a 2025 landscape where 70% of Americans consume news via personalized feeds (per Pew Research), the risk of collective forgetting grows. Algorithms, much like voicemails, bury the urgent under the entertaining.

As Vasquez packs her kit for the next cold case, the message from Alex Rivera plays in her mind’s loop. “Please don’t forget me.” It’s a plea not just to Mimi, but to all of us in media’s specialized trenches. In chasing the story’s depth, we must remember its breadth—the human pulse that beats beneath every lead. For in forgetting, we risk becoming the very silence we seek to shatter.