\n\tWhen police arrived, Owens was unresponsive. Neighbors had tried unsuccessfully to perform CPR. Medical experts later pronounced her dead at the hospital. Lorincz was taken into police custody<\/a> but quickly released after giving her testimony, citing that she only pulled the trigger because she was afraid for her life. Her defense \u2014 that she was \u201cscared\u201d Owens was going to kill her\u00a0\u2014 took language directly from Florida\u2019s stand your ground<\/a> law, which allows residents to use deadly force in their home if they fear for their lives. This statute exists in some form in almost 30 states according to Everytown Research<\/a> and has been used in some of the most prominent court cases in the past two decades. This includes the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17; the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery, 25; and 2023 shooting of Ralph Yarl, 16 \u2014 all of which were cases of white men shooting Black teens and young adults because they considered them threats. In Netflix<\/a>\u2019s new documentary The Perfect Neighbor, out Oct.17, director Geeta Gandbhir walks viewers through the circumstances of Owens\u2019 death. Stand your ground laws were touted as a way to keep people safe. How did it leave four kids without their mom?\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI\u2019m a documentary filmmaker. Curiosity drives us,\u201d Gandbhir tells Rolling Stone. \u201cAnd I felt really compelled to understand how this could happen. How did we get from a trivial dispute about children playing in a yard near Susan\u2019s house to her picking up a gun and [killing] AJ? How could this happen?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhile the Perfect Neighbor begins with the police response to the shooting, \u00a0viewers are given almost a chronological retelling of the escalating arguments that ended in Owens death \u2014 all from the perspective of police body camera footage. There is no overlying narration from witnesses or law experts. Instead, police conversations are a constant, accompanied by dozens of filmed interactions with Lorincz and her neighbors by the Marion County Sheriff\u2019s Office. There are interviews with Lorincz, statements from people in the neighborhood, filmed testimony from children as they ride their bikes and\u00a0 play kickball, and conversations between deputies themselves calling Lorincz\u2019s responses\u2019 overblown. But even after multiple deputies and police officers encouraged Lorincz to leave the children alone \u2014\u00a0and asked the children to involve their parents instead of responding to Lorincz directly \u2014 the conflicts continued. \u201cIs there anything I can do with these people?\u201d Lorincz asked police during one of dozens of 911 calls. \u201cBecause they\u2019re getting ridiculous. I don\u2019t bug anybody. I\u2019m a single woman. I work from home. I\u2019m peaceful. I\u2019m like the perfect neighbor.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tAjike Owens\u2019 loved ones hold up a picture of her. <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNetflix<\/p>\n \n\tThe Perfect Neighbor takes a frank \u2014\u00a0if not uncomfortable \u2014\u00a0approach to Owens\u2019 shooting, including clips of Owens\u2019 children begging for aid, neighbors attempting to do 911 before first responders take over, and the heartbreaking moment when Owen\u2019s mother, Pamela Dias, and Owens\u2019 children are informed she has succumbed to her injuries. \u201cHearing Pamela on the phone, to me, is the hardest part to bear,\u201d Gandbhir says. \u201cThere\u2019s an expectation that children will outlive their parents, but as a parent, you never want to outlive your child.\u201d But it also includes police footage of the protests and interviews that happened after Owens\u2019 death, including Lorincz\u2019s statement, all focused around Florida\u2019s controversial stand your ground law.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tStand your ground laws and their complicated history\t<\/p>\n \n\tMost stand your ground laws center around justifiable uses of force, according to Cynthia Godsoe, a professor of criminal law at Brooklyn Law School. Also referred to as a type of castle doctrine, these laws require that people fulfill certain criteria \u2014 like being physically on their inside their homes and being in fear of their life \u2014 before they can be legally justified in using a weapon to protect themselves. In the past two decades, dozens of states have expanded these laws to also include private property generally \u2014\u00a0meaning you could successfully use a stand your ground law just by being inside your property line and feeling threatened rather than in your home. However, research<\/a> has shown that stand your ground laws not only increase rates <\/a>of violence and homicides in states that implement them, but are disproportionately used against people of color. According to a 2022 study<\/a>, stand your ground laws were associated with an eight percent increase in monthly homicide rates in states that have them. A Tampa Bay Times<\/a> investigation into over 200 cases that cited stand your ground laws found that people were more likely to escape prosecution if their victim was Black. Owens was a Black mother shot by a white woman through a locked door, mirroring similar national cases where Black individuals were shot under stand your ground laws while doing things like jogging or ringing unfamiliar doorbells.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWith stand your ground laws, it kind of shifts the burden of proof. Normally, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone did something, in this case, manslaughter,\u201d Godsoe explains. \u201cBut once you assert self defense like this, it almost smears the victim. The prosecution has to prove that this person was not actually scary. And this is where race plays in. Because we know with systemic racism, people will interpret threats from Black people more broadly. So now we\u2019ve deputized people across the country who are gun owners to take things into their own hands.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tRoughly two months after Owens\u2019 death, Gandbhir and her producers filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Marion County Sheriff\u2019s Office, asking for police body camera footage associated with the case. They were given over 30 hours of material on a thumbdrive, dash cam footage, body camera recordings, and clips from community Ring cameras, all of which were jumbled, out of date, and often missing the associated audio. Gandbhir describes it as a \u201chuge process,\u201d to make sense out of the material, but after she was able to put it in chronological order, she realized the body camera footage offered a perspective often missing from typical true-crime documentaries<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhen there is a terrible crime in this country, when it comes to gun violence, unfortunately you only really ever see the aftermath. You see the grieving family. Maybe you see the funeral. You see people talking to the news,\u201d she says. \u201cBut in this [body cam] footage, we had two years leading up to the incident in which you saw this beautiful little community living together, loving each other that the police inadvertently went in and captured all. And that footage is undeniable, because there was no one there on the ground directing anything. No reporter, no journalist. I wasn\u2019t there. Nothing else is influencing them. And you see what happened play out in real time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn Owens\u2019 case, community members protested after the shooting until Lorincz was arrested. In Aug. 2024, Lorincz was found guilty of first-degree felony manslaughter with a firearm. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where she remains. In his ruling, Judge Robert Hodges said that shooting was based \u201cmore in anger than in fear.\u201d Members of Owens\u2019 family were present when Lorincz received her sentence, footage of which plays during the final credits scene of The Perfect Neighbor. The film\u2019s 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 took home the directing award for U.S. Documentary. For Gandbhir, while the release of the film feels like a full circle moment in honoring Owens\u2019 life, she hopes people who watch the documentary will learn just how dangerous stand your ground laws have made life for many Americans. \u201cAjike should still be with us today,\u201d Gandbhir says. \u201cBut in her absence, it\u2019s our goal that we fulfill her dream by making change. We hope the world will remember her name.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Ajike \u201cAJ\u201d Owens went to Susan Lorincz\u2019s door on June 2, 2023, the confrontation was one in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[10167,88,217,129836,40984],"class_list":{"0":"post-233538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-documentaries","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-netflix","11":"tag-stand-your-ground","12":"tag-true-crime"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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