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

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.