White woman found guilty of manslaughter with a firearm for fatally shooting Black neighbor amid dispute over kids playing

(CNN) — A Florida jury on Friday found a 60-year-old White woman guilty of manslaughter with a firearm for fatally shooting an unarmed Black mother during an ongoing dispute over children playing near her home.

The panel had considered whether Susan Lorincz was justified under the state’s controversial self-defense laws for shooting through the front door of her central Florida apartment last June and killing 35-year-old Ajike “AJ” Owens, who had been knocking on Lorincz’s door. The trial tested the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows people to use deadly force in self-defense in certain situations.

Lorincz was charged with manslaughter with a firearm and pleaded not guilty. She faces up to 30 years in prison, according to State Attorney Bill Gladson’s office. No sentencing date has been set.

Lorincz, wearing a purple sweater over a dark dress, stood and showed no emotion as the verdict was read and the jury polled. Friends and members of the victim’s family wept in the front row.

“This has been a long journey to get to this day, to get to this verdict,” the victim’s mother, Pamela Dias, told reporters outside the Ocala courthouse.

“I am very pleased with the jury, the prosecution, the verdict … I find some peace with that verdict. I feel that although my daughter is gone forever, the children’s mom is gone forever, we’ve achieved some justice for Ajike. My heart is a little lighter and we’re now on the path to healing.”

A family representative said the victim’s four children were still in counseling and now it was up to the court to impose the maximum penalty.

Ben Crump, an attorney for the victim’s family, said they were “profoundly grateful” for the guilty verdict.

“AJ Owens was a devoted mother whose life was tragically cut short, leaving her children, including a young son who witnessed this horrific act, to carry the burden of her loss,” he said in a statement.

“While nothing can erase the pain they’ve endured, today’s decision sends a clear message that senseless violence will be met with accountability.”

After the verdict, a member of the defense team, Amanda Sizemore, declined to comment.

After deliberating for about half an hour, jurors asked to rehear two 911 calls Lorincz made that night. In one from before the shooting, Lorincz told a dispatcher she was “really scared,” with little emotion in her voice. “Are you or anyone else in danger right now?” the dispatcher asked. “I locked my door,” she responded.

During the second 911 call, which took place after the shooting, Lorincz sounds as if she is crying, her voice barely audible. She said someone tried breaking down her door and that she fired at the door. The jury, which deliberated about two and half hours, later asked another question about damage to the door to Lorincz’s home.

‘She has no duty to retreat’

In his closing argument, prosecutor Rich Buxman told jurors Lorincz admitted pulling the trigger and killing Owens.

“It wasn’t an accidental situation. It wasn’t a situation where she slipped and the gun accidentally went off and shot the door and struck Ms. Owens,” Buxman said. “That’s not what we have here. She intentionally fired it. There’s no doubt that the defendant intentionally committed an act, which caused the death of Ajike Owens.”

Buxman said Lorincz acted with “utter disregard for the life of others.”

“She pointed a loaded firearm towards a door, towards a person that she knew was there in the opposite side of the door and intentionally pulled the trigger. That shows a reckless disregard for human life,” he told jurors.

In her closing argument, Sizemore told jurors the case is one of perception.

“The constitution of our country embodies the right to be able to defend ourselves,” said Sizemore, whose remarks followed the prosecution’s closing argument. “The law demands that we assess the reasonableness of that perception, not from the comfort of a courtroom, but we have to take ourselves back to the perspective of the moment itself.”

Under Florida law, Sizemore said, citizens have the right to defend themselves in the face of imminent danger. “She has no duty to retreat, and she can stand her ground when she is in her dwelling if she is faced with imminent danger,” she said of Lorincz.

Sizemore described Lorincz as an older woman with medical issues who lived alone in a troubled neighborhood when one night she was “startled by a barrage of screaming, profanities and banging on her door.”

“In that circumstance, it’s what Susan Lorincz reasonably believed was necessary to prevent – that’s a very important word, prevent. The law does not say that you have to wait to get punched or attacked before you can do something. You can use deadly force to prevent someone from coming into your home and hurting you or attacking you,” Sizemore said.

“So how do we decide whether somebody is justified in using deadly force?” the defense lawyer asked.

“You must consider the circumstances at the time the force was used – all of it. The fact that she’s in her home. She’s alone. It’s nighttime. Her knowledge of Ajike Owens and her past interactions with her. The noise level, with the pounding and the screaming of the profanities.”

Lorincz decided to not testify at her trial

While the defense has maintained Lorincz had “no choice” but to shoot, Buxman countered that line of reasoning Friday morning, saying in order for the defendant to lawfully use deadly force, the threat to her life “must be imminent.”

“It had to be ready to happen. It had to be staring her in the face such as she had to act at that moment to protect her life,” the prosecutor said in his closing remarks.

“If Ms. Owens would somehow have managed to bust through this locked, dead bolted metal door, enter her house and start coming at her, the defendant may have had a right to shoot … but that’s not the situation we have here.”

On Thursday, Lorincz told the court, after consulting her attorneys, she had decided not to testify. The defense rested after calling expert witnesses on ballistics and police training who testified about where Lorincz was standing when she opened fire and her state of mind at the time of the shooting.

A day earlier, jurors heard testimony from Marion County Sheriff’s Detective Ryan Stith, the lead investigator in the case. Prosecutors asked Stith to read a letter Lorincz reportedly wrote to Owens’ four children after he informed her she would be charged in Owens’ death.

“I am so, so sorry for your loss,” Stith read to the court. “I never meant to kill your mother. I was terrified your mom was going to kill me. I shot out of fear.”

Outside the courthouse, Dias told reporters before the verdict was announced she struggled to maintain her composure throughout the trial.

“‘Difficult’ is putting it very mildly,” Dias said. “The amount of emotions, the disgust, the anguish, the pain – to sit there literally feet away from the woman who took my daughter’s life … I have to dig deep within my strength, my faith to hold it all together.”

In the video of her first interrogation, shown to jurors Wednesday, Lorincz tells detectives she’d previously argued with Owens about her children playing loudly and leaving toys outside her home. But she tells police the situation escalated on June 2, 2023, after she confronted the children about the noise and threw their roller skates.

Lorincz tells detectives she called the police that evening to report neighborhood children had threatened to kill her. She says dispatchers told her to lock her door and officers were on the way.

But before police could arrive, Lorincz tells detectives, Owens began “banging on my door” and saying, “I’m going to kill you.”   

“She bangs so hard it looked like my door was going to fly off,” Lorincz said in the video. “And I just, I panicked and I was like, ‘Oh my god, she’s really going to kill me this time.’ You know? And so, I don’t even remember picking the gun up, I just remember shooting.”

CNN’s Joe Sutton and Maxime Tamsett contributed to this report.

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