When Ajike “AJ” Owens arrived at Susan Lorincz's door on June 2, 2023, the confrontation was one of a series of years-long disagreements between the two neighbors.
Lorintz, 58 at the time, and Owens, 35, lived in an apartment complex in Ocala, Florida, a small community of duplexes filled with young families. Many neighborhood children played on the small lawn next to Lorinc's house, holding small games and activities in the open area. Lorinc, white, hated loud noise and called the police and emergency services claiming on several occasions over the years that children are trespassing, annoying, threatening and a nuisance. Some children called her a racist and a “Karen,” telling their parents that she called them the n-word. “This is just ridiculous,” Lorincz said during a 911 call around 8:54 that June evening. ” [kids] just keep pestering me and pestering me. I'm just tired of these kids. Now that they're back from school, it's just crazy.” After several children told their parents that Lorincz had yelled at them and thrown a pair of roller skates at a 10-year-old girl, Owens, a black mother of four, approached Lorincz and loudly knocked on Lorincz's door, demanding she come outside. Two minutes later, authorities received a second call from Lorincz, this time saying she had shot a woman through a locked front door. “I didn’t know what to do,” Lorinc cried on the train. Call 911. “I thought she was going to kill me.”
When police arrived, Owens did not respond. Neighbors tried unsuccessfully to perform artificial respiration. Medical examiners later pronounced her dead at the hospital. Lorinc was taken into police custody but was quickly released after testifying, citing the fact that she only pulled the trigger because she was afraid for her life. Her defense – that she was “afraid” Owens was going to kill her – was taken directly from Florida. stand your ground A law that allows residents to use deadly force in their home if they fear for their lives. Nearly 30 states have some form of this law, according to the law. City exploration and has been used in some of the most famous court cases of the last two decades. These include the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012; the 2020 murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery; and the 2023 shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Jarl were all cases of white men shooting black teenagers and young adults because they perceived them as a threat. IN Netflixnew documentary Ideal neighborOn October 17, director Gita Gandbhir tells viewers about the circumstances of Owens' death. “Stand your ground” laws were touted as a way to keep people safe. How were four children left without a mother?
“I am a documentary filmmaker. Curiosity drives us,” says Gandbhir. Rolling Stone. “And I felt obligated to understand how this could happen. How we went from a trivial argument about children playing in the yard outside Susan's house to her picking up a gun and [killing] AJ? How could this happen?
While Ideal neighbor begins with the police response to the shooting, viewers are given a near-chronological retelling of the escalating controversy that ended with Owens' death—all from the perspective of police camera footage. There are no additional stories from witnesses or legal experts. Instead, the constant conversations with police are accompanied by dozens of taped conversations with Lorincz and her neighbors from the Marion County Sheriff's Office. There are interviews with Lorinc, statements from area residents, videotaped testimony of children riding bikes and playing kickball, and conversations between deputies themselves calling Lorinc's answers exaggerated. But even after several deputies and police officers called on Lorinc to leave the children alone and asked the children to involve their parents instead of responding directly to Lorinc, the conflicts continued. “Can I do anything about these people?” Lorincz asked police during one of dozens of calls to 911. “Because they're getting funny. I'm not harassing anyone. I'm a single woman. I work from home. I'm peaceful. I'm like the perfect neighbor.”
Adjika Owens' loved ones hold a photo of her.
Netflix
Ideal neighbor takes a candid, if not uncomfortable, approach to Owens' shooting, including videos of Owens' children begging for help, neighbors trying to call 911 before first responders arrive to help, and the heartbreaking moment when Owens' mother, Pamela Diaz, and Owens' children are told she has died from her injuries. injuries “The hardest thing for me is hearing Pamela on the phone,” says Gandbhir. “There is an expectation that children will outlive their parents, but as a parent you never want to outlive your child.” But it also includes police footage of protests and interviews that occurred after Owens' death, including Lorinc's statement, all centered around Florida's controversial “stand your ground” law.
Preserve your basic laws and their complex history.
Most major laws focus on justified use of force, according to Cynthia Godsoe, a professor of criminal law at Brooklyn Law School. These laws, also called a variation of the castle doctrine, require people to meet certain criteria — such as being physically inside their homes and fearing for their lives — before they can be legally justified in using a gun for protection. Over the past two decades, dozens of states have expanded these laws to include private property in general. This means that you can successfully use your ground law simply by being inside your property line and feeling threatened, rather than inside your home. However, research showed that you are worth your basic laws not only raise rates violence and murder in states where they occur, but are disproportionately used against people of color. According to 2022 studystand your ground, the laws have been linked to an eight percent increase in the monthly murder rate in states with them. A Tampa Bay Times An investigation of more than 200 cases involving “stand your ground” laws found that people were more likely to avoid prosecution if the victim was black. Owens was a black mother shot to death by a white woman through a locked door, reflecting similar national cases of black people being shot under your basic laws while doing things like jogging or ringing unfamiliar doorbells.
“If you stick to the basic laws, it kind of shifts the burden of proof. Usually the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone did something, in this case manslaughter,” Godsoe explains. “But as soon as you claim self-defense in that way, it almost vilifies the victim. The prosecution has to prove that this person wasn't actually scary. And that's where race comes into play. Because we know that with systemic racism, people will interpret threats from black people more broadly. So now we've instructed people across the country who are gun owners to take matters into their own hands.”
About two months after Owens' death, Gandbhir and her producers filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Marion County Sheriff's Office asking for police body camera footage related to the case. They were provided with more than 30 hours of material on a flash drive, dash cam footage, body camera footage and clips from Ring community cameras, all of which were jumbled, out of date and often lacked corresponding audio. Gandbhir describes it as a “huge process” to make sense of the material, but after she was able to put it in chronological order, she realized that the body camera footage offered a perspective often missing from typical true crime cases. documentaries.
“When a terrible crime happens in this country, when it comes to gun violence, unfortunately all you see is the aftermath. You see a grieving family. Maybe you see a funeral. You see people talking about the news,” she says. “But in this [body cam] In the footage we had two years leading up to the incident where you saw this beautiful little community living together, loving each other, but the police accidentally intervened and captured everyone. And these shots are undeniable, because there was no one on earth who was in charge of anything. Neither a reporter nor a journalist. I wasn't there. Nothing else affects them. And you will see what happened in real time.”
In Owens' case, community members protested after the shooting until Lorincz was arrested. In August 2024, Lorinc was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter with a firearm. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where she remains. In his ruling, Judge Robert Hodges said the shooting was motivated “more by anger than by fear.” Members of Owens' family were present when Lorincz received her sentence, footage of which plays during the film's end credits. Ideal neighbor. The film's debut on Netflix is the first time audiences will be able to see it since its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the directing award in the US documentary category. For Gandbhir, while the film's release feels like a moment to fully honor Owens' life, she hopes people who watch the documentary will learn how dangerous the stance of your land laws has made the lives of many Americans. “Ajike should be with us today,” says Gandbhir. “But in her absence, our goal is to fulfill her dream by making a change. We hope the world remembers her name.”
