Newly released body-camera footage obtained by HuffPost shows sheriff’s deputies responding to a number of complaints made by Susan Lorincz, the white Florida woman charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of Ajike “AJ” Owens, her Black neighbor.
Lorincz, 58, is accused of killing Owens by firing through the front door of her Ocala apartment on June 2 after Owens, a 35-year-old mother of four, repeatedly knocked. Owens had come to her apartment after learning that Lorincz had taken one of her sons’ tablets, thrown it on the ground, cursed at him and then thrown a pair of roller skates at him, her sons and a neighbor told police, according to an arrest affidavit.
In the months leading up to the shooting, Lorincz had called the police on multiple occasions complaining about Owens, her children and other neighbors, with allegations ranging from trespassing and noise to the kids calling her a “Karen.” No arrests had been made as a result of her calls, and videos show the sheriff’s deputies repeatedly emphasizing to Lorincz and her neighbors that the trespassing claims were in areas that were not her property.
Authorities previously said that Lorincz had admitted to calling Owens’ children by racial slurs, including the n-word.
In the past, Lorincz claimed that she had been bullied by the children. “I don’t want to be intimidated by them screaming and yelling at me, telling me that I’m a bitch, calling me ‘Karen’ … I mean, they’re calling me names,” she tells deputies in one video from August 2022 after she called to complain about their noise.
“There’s other places they can play,” she says she told their parents, who responded by saying the kids weren’t hurting anyone or causing any damage. “Well, they’re damaging me,” she tells deputies, saying their noise is exacerbating her migraines and affecting her concentration.
In one bodycam interview from April, half a dozen children tell a deputy responding to another complaint by Lorincz that she had repeatedly been “aggressive,” yelling profanities and racial slurs at them. A 10-year-old girl combing the hair of her mermaid Barbie tells the deputy that Lorincz called the neighborhood kids the n-word; an older girl says the woman had also called them “sex slave bastards.” After the June shooting, Owens’ son told police that Lorincz had previously told him, “This isn’t the underground railroad, slave,” according to the arrest affidavit.
In February 2022, Lorincz told deputies that Owens had hit her with a sign.
Owens doesn’t deny to two deputies that she had thrown the sign, the bodycam footage shows, but she does deny that it hit Lorincz. “She has the sign, and she’s basically ramming the sign in my face,” Owens says. After Lorincz put it down, Owens tells the deputies, “I picked the sign up, and I threw the sign.”
During one police visit in April, a neighbor asks to speak to the deputies who are talking to Lorincz, and the video shows “no trespassing” signs in a field behind him. “She keeps calling [police] every time, over stupidity — literally kids going around,” the man says in the police video. Lorincz did not own her duplex apartment, and the grass field and other areas where the children had been playing were shared by the community.
The neighbor interviewed in April said Lorincz would get in her car and rev it in retaliation when children and barking dogs bothered her. Other neighbors told deputies that Lorincz would park her truck near areas where the children were playing and would set off her car alarm.
In a November 2022 phone call recorded on a deputy’s body camera, Lorincz calls her neighbors “hooligans.”
“I don’t bug anybody. … I’m like the perfect neighbor,” she tells the deputy.
Florida prosecutors have declined to file murder charges against Lorincz, who claimed she was in fear for her life when she shot Owens. She has instead been charged with one count of manslaughter with a firearm and one count of assault. Florida State Attorney William “Bill” Gladson said that Lorincz showed no evidence of a “depraved mind,” a disregard for human life that under state statutes differentiates second-degree murder from manslaughter.
“Depraved mind requires evidence of hatred, spite, ill will or evil intent toward the victim at the time of the killing,” Gladson said. “As deplorable as the defendant’s actions were in this case, there is insufficient evidence to prove this specific and required element of second-degree murder.”
Lorincz could face up to 30 years in prison. A judge granted a $154,000 bond with the condition that she wear an ankle monitor and stay away from the Owens family.
