The Susan Lorincz Case: Fear, Bias, and the Door That Changed Everything

On June 2, 2023, in Ocala, Florida, a long-running neighborhood dispute ended in tragedy when Susan Lorincz fired a single shot through her locked front door, killing her neighbor, Ajike “AJ” Owens, while AJ’s young son stood beside her. 

In this episode of GBRLIFE of Crimes, we examine the Susan Lorincz case beyond the headline. This is not just a story about one fatal shot. It is a case about fear, racial bias, trauma, Florida’s Stand Your Ground debate, and what happens when the legal system has to decide whose fear is considered “reasonable.” 

Susan Lorincz claimed self-defense. Prosecutors argued that the 150 seconds between her 911 call and the shooting were not instinct — they were choices. She walked away, retrieved a firearm, returned, and fired through a closed, locked, windowless door. A jury later found her guilty of manslaughter with a firearm. 

We also talk about Ajike “AJ” Owens — a mother of four, a beloved member of her community, and a woman whose life cannot be reduced to the moment she was killed. Her family described her as a devoted mother whose life centered around her children, their safety, and their future. 

This case raises difficult questions:
 Was this self-defense?
 How does racial bias shape perceived threat?
 Can trauma explain fear without excusing violence?
 And what happens when gun laws, untreated trauma, and prejudice collide?

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Transcript

Kaitlyn: 0:00

The sound of children playing, laughter, the smack of roller skates on pavement, a summer evening in central Florida, the kind of ordinary neighborhood noise that fills a block and means absolutely nothing to most people. Then a door opening, a woman's voice, sharp and tight. Get off my lawn! Get away from here! The children scatter. The door closes, But a young boy forgets his tablet, so he goes back to retrieve it, and a 911 call, then another, then another, then on the night of June 2nd, 2023, a final call. And then 150 seconds later a shot through the door and a 10 year old boy standing next to his mother when the bullet came through that door his mother never got back up. Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them. Today, we're examining the case of Susan Louise Lorincz, a 58-year-old woman in Ocala, Florida, who on June 2nd, 2023, fired a single bullet through her locked, windowless front door and killed her neighbor, Ajike Owens. While Owens' 10-year-old son stood right beside her, Lorincz claimed self-defense. A jury of six people deliberated for two hours and said, no, that's not self-defense. And she's currently serving 25 years in Florida State Prison with a release date of April 8th, 2048. And the case that she left behind. Has become one of the most examined intersections of childhood trauma, racial bias, gun law, and the fundamental question of whose fear America decides is worth protecting. And when the law is built on that standard, who does it actually protect? Susan Lorincz grew up in New Jersey. She was not from Florida, but that's not an uncommon thing in Florida. Many come from the North. In her case, she arrived in the state in her 30s, relocating to Spring Hill to be near her parents, and she built a small, quiet life there. She worked as a chef at a nursing home. She worked in insurance claims and did administrative tasks. She sang in the choir at her Methodist church. Her pastor described her voice as beautiful. She baked for her friends. She took care of her nephew. Her friend of 13 years, Crystal, testified at the trial that Lorincz was a giver, that she was always taking care of people. And that the woman described in the courtroom was, and this is a direct quote, almost the exact opposite of the person I know. As she got older, she lived alone in an 800-square-foot apartment. There is no romantic relationships on record, and no children of her own. Her social world was small and organized, all around work, church, and a handful of close friendships. Her defense team described her as a nearly 59-year-old woman with significant health issues. And those health issues were real and documented. She had undergone 25 knee surgeries on her right knee, eventually requiring multiple replacements, the last of which resulted in catastrophic failure due to an allergy. She had an aneurysm in her left kidney artery, a condition that meant elevated blood pressure could have life-threatening consequences. She was not in any physical sense a woman equipped for an actual physical fight. She was also a woman with a childhood that had done significant damage to her nervous system in ways that no amount of church attendance and baking required. Could fully heal without therapy. Her younger sister, Ellen, testified at sentencing, and the picture she painted was a family that was broken in almost every direction that you could look. Their grandfather died by his own hand just before Ellen was born, and Susan would have been around three years old. Their father was a drunk who gambled the family's money away, and their mother, according to Eileen, was a good woman who struggled with severe depression and was not able to protect her children. And their brother also became an alcoholic and also violent. Ellen herself was eventually assaulted by him and the siblings cut off all contact. An uncle had serious mental health issues and at one point tried to burn down their house. And then there's their father's abuse of the children. A clinical psychologist who conducted extensive interviews with Susan Lorincz, Dr. Castillo, testified at sentencing that Lorincz had been abused by her father from aged four to 20 years old. 16 years. Ellen confirmed it. Their father was, she said, physically, emotionally, and abusive in all ways to all of them. He beat them a lot. Dr. Castillo diagnosed Lorincz with chronic PTSD. D, 16 years of abuse beginning at age four is among the most severe forms of complex trauma a human being can experience. And what it produces in adulthood is a nervous system that has been fundamentally rewired for survival. That diagnosis... Was clinically sound. It was also, as we will examine in detail later, not the complete explanation for what happened on June 2nd. Because PTSD shapes how intensely you perceive threat. It does not determine who you perceive as threatening. And the evidence of who Susan found threatening in the 16 months before, it's not ambiguous. Which brings us to understanding who her victim was. Adjika Owens, known as AJ, was born on January 13th, 1988, in Broward County. And while she was born in Broward, she grew up in Ocala, graduating from Vanguard High School in 2006, and built her entire life in Marion County. And as I said, she went by AJ. Her family described her smile as something that could light up any room she walked into. And from the photographs and footage, that became part of the documentary record of this case. And that description feels exact. A.G. was a single mother of four. Isaac, Israel, who everyone called Izzy, Africa, and Titus. She was their mom, their team mom, for football, for cheerleading. She made sure they were baptized and raised in faith. She was a manager in the restaurant and hospitality industry, a committed Christian, a woman who organized her entire existence around her children's safety, their futures, and their daily experience of being loved. Her best friend Kimberly described her exactly this way at the press conference after her death. When you met AJ, her smile would light up the room. She made sacrifices as a single mom to be there for each of them in every stage of their lives. The neighborhood where they lived, the Quail Run apartment complex in Ocala, This is what Kimberly, her best friend, called a family neighborhood. The moms knew each other because all the kids were at the bus stop together. It was the kind of place where children played outside in the evening. In a shared grassy area, because that's what children did. Apartments or not, those kids were having the times of their lives, enjoying spending time outside, being kids. But AJ knew that Susan had a problem with her children playing there, and the dispute that had been going on since at least February of 2022, 16 months before AJ was killed. She had spoken to her mother, Pamela, Pamela Dias, about during that time. She was managing an escalating situation with a neighbor who seemed to find her children's existence in a shared space intolerable. She was trying to protect them while also trying to prevent things from going somewhere none of them could come back from. But she obviously didn't succeed at the prevention. But not because of her. That failure will never belong to her. The killing of A.J. was the conclusion of a documented pattern, not an isolated incident. From January 2021 through June 2023, the Marion County Sheriff's Office responded to approximately six documented calls involving Susan Lorincz and the Owens. Those calls and the body cam footage captured during each one and would eventually become the backbone of the Netflix documentary. The perfect neighbor, and all of the footage was obtained. Through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by A.J. Owens' family's attorneys who understood from the beginning that the record of what had been happening before June 2nd was essential to understanding June 2nd. And what that footage shows is not dramatic. And that's the part that makes it so disturbing. You watch a woman get increasingly agitated about a shared grassy area adjacent to her building. You watch her call the police on children. Let that sink in for a minute. She's calling the police because little children are in a space, a shared space, outside, just playing normal during normal daylight hours. And you watch her film those children for hours, recording their play as if building a case file. You watch her invoke real estate law and the right to peaceful, quiet enjoyment of property and conversations. With deputies who came out repeatedly and found repeatedly nothing rising to the level of criminal conduct. You watch her describe herself. In one of those calls, she describes herself as the perfect neighbor. The body cam footage also captured what deputies saw and what the neighbors described. Lorincz verbally harassing those children when they're outside, shouting what neighbors described as nasty things. Racial, nasty, horrible things. According to the arrest affidavit and law enforcement records, Lorincz admitted to using racial slurs towards Owen's children. She called them the N-word. She referred to them as slaves. Multiple neighbors confirmed this pattern. One neighbor who had lived in the area for about 15 years told NBC News that. Lorincz would come outside and harass the children whenever they were in that grassy area. She said, and this is a direct quote, every time they've even touched that patch of grass over there, she would be immediately in their face telling them, Get off my lawn, you. B word, R word, N word. And she would wave guns at them. She waved guns at children playing outside. And then there were earlier confrontations that went into the police record as well. 16 months before the shooting, Lorincz claimed Owens had attacked her with a no trespassing sign. No arrest was made. Six months before the shooting, Lorincz called 911 alleging Owens had threatened her. No arrest was made. The prosecution would later point out that in her post-shooting interview with detectives, Lorincz did not mention feeling scared during any of those earlier confrontations. Fear apparently was something that emerged only on the night that she had a gun in her hand, behind a closed door. That documented record of racial harassment is what made the next fact so significant. Almost none of it was allowed into the trial. But that also brings us to that afternoon, June 2nd, 2023. Susan was filming the children again. Prosecutors documented that she had been recording the children in the field for hours before the final confrontation. At some point in the late afternoon, the situation escalated physically. Lorincz got into a confrontation with Owen's children. She threw a roller skate at Isaac, AJ's 10-year-old son, hitting him in the foot. She allegedly also took one of the children's tablets. When Isaac and his brother went to her door, she swung an umbrella at them. The children went home and told their mother what happened. So if you're thinking there was some sort of physical altercation between AJ and Lorincz, no, just Lorincz. Towards the children. And no, the children did not attack back. But Lorincz did call 911. And on that call, she reported that the children were trespassing and that the children had threatened to beat her up. She said, and I want you to hear this because it matters for understanding her psychology. She said she was fearing for her life. A 58-year-old woman with 25 knee surgeries and a kidney aneurysm, afraid for her life because, a 10-year-old boy who had never touched her or harmed her in any way was outside playing, and she threw a roller skate at him, told her, I'm going to beat you up, but never did, never even tried to. But she was afraid for her life. Deputies from the Marion County Sheriff's Office were dispatched immediately, and they were only 10 to 15 minutes away. What happened next is documented in precise detail from the trial testimony. 150 seconds. Two and a half minutes. In that window, AJ, unarmed, walked to Lorincz's front door. She knocked. She waited for Lorincz to come outside. According to multiple witnesses who were present, Owens was angry. She was banging on the door. She was yelling. But none of the witnesses said she was trying to break in. She was asking Lorincz to come outside and face her. Probably because Lorincz was throwing things at her children and waving guns at them. I think any parent can understand why AJ was slightly upset. Inside the apartment, Susan was in the bathroom when she first heard the banging. She came out of the bathroom. She recognized Owen's voice at the door. And then according to prosecutors, she did not go directly to the door. She walked to the kitchen first, then to the bedroom, where she kept her firearms, got her gun. Then she came back, positioned herself near the kitchen table, which a forensic expert at trial estimated placed her 12 to 15 feet away from the front door. She raised her gun and, according to the ballistics expert testimony, nearly above her head with two hands, and she fired a single shot through her own closed, locked, and windowless front door. The door, which Susan's landlord testified was structurally sound with a chain, a deadbolt, and a lock with three-inch screws, was not in any danger of being forced open. The physical evidence at the scene found no indication that Owens had attempted to breach the door. Orr posed an imminent threat at the moment of shot. The bullet struck A.J. In the chest. She collapsed. Isaac, her 10-year-old son, was standing next to her. Deputies arrived to find Owens on the ground with a single gunshot wound, and she was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead shortly after arrival. Detectives found a shell casing on the kitchen counter. They found the gun in the trash. Pamela Dias, A.J.'s mother, was in Atlanta that night. Preparing to start a new job as a flight attendant. She got a phone call and she said, I'm told over the phone that my daughter has been killed. I cried. I screamed. I screamed. Susan cooperated with the deputies from the moment they arrived at the scene. She was inside her apartment. She made no attempts to flee. She gave interviews to detectives willingly. And she was not arrested that night. She wasn't even arrested the next day. It took five days and sustained public pressure before Marion County Sheriff's Office decided to take her into custody. And during those five days, the sheriff's office stated publicly that they were evaluating whether the Stand Your Ground statute applied. Apparently, they not only enforce the law, but they also get to be judge and jury before they take you in, at least in this case. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump immediately and publicly called for Susan's arrest, describing the incident as an inconscionable killing of a mother who simply knocked on a door. Yes, she was angry. I'm sure it sounded like she was angry when she knocked on that door. But she was shot and killed. And no one was in jail for it. And they knew exactly who did it. Approximately 30 protesters gathered outside of the Judicial Center, demanding action. And the Owens family attorney formally requested the charge be upgraded from manslaughter to second-degree murder. So on June 6th, 2023, Susan was arrested and charged, but not with second-degree murder, with manslaughter, with a firearm. Culpable negligence, battery, and two counts of assault. She posted a $150,000 bond and pleaded not guilty on July 10th. Her release date was set, and the trial was scheduled for over a year later. Pamela Dias did not go back to Atlanta. She gave up the flight attendant job, she relocated to Ocala, and she now cares for her four grandchildren. She attended every single hearing, and she became the face and the voice of accountability in this case. And she never wavered. At a press conference following the arrest, the sheriff stated clearly that this situation is a prime example of when stand your ground was not justified. It was simply a killing. But that brings us to the trial. On August 12th, 2024, 14 months after AJ was killed, the jury was six people. And while you may not care, in this case it does matter, they were all white. And Susan did not testify in her own defense. The prosecution's opening statement was delivered by Assistant State Attorney Adam Smith. He walked the jury through the events of June 2nd, the prior incidents involving Susan and the Owens' children, the 911 call, and the 150-second gap between the call and the shot. He made the central argument clear from the beginning. Those 150 seconds between Susan's call and the shot were not a trauma response. They were a sequence of choices. She had options, and she made one. The prosecution called a range of witnesses, neighbors who had seen Susan's behavior toward the children over 16 months. Deputies who responded to the scene, a 911 dispatcher, crime scene investigators, forensic experts, and critically, A.J. Owens' landlord, Charles Gabbard, who testified that Susan's front door had been recently repaired and was structurally sound, with a chain, a deadbolt, and a lock with three-inch screws. The defense had claimed that Owens was going to break down the door. But Gabbard testified that the door was not breaking down. It was just replaced and very solid. One thing the prosecution was not allowed to present to the jury was the full record of Susan's racial slurs. The judge ruled that testimony about her calling the children the N-word and Black slaves would be prejudice. What the jury heard instead was a single recording of a detective interview in which Susan denied the allegations when asked. That was the extent of the racial context the jury received. The defense opening statement was delivered dramatically. Attorney Morris Carranza pounded his fist on the podium. He played Susan's 911 call, in which she was crying so hard you couldn't really decipher her. The defense strategy had two main pillars. First, stand your ground. Florida law does not require a threat to be real. Only that the defendant reasonably believed that she faced imminent death or great bodily harm. Renza argued that Susan's mind in her soul and in her core, she felt she had no choice. Second, the defense argued that Owens was the aggressor, that she was the one pounding the door so hard the wall shook. That she screamed and that she was claiming she was going to kill Susan. And that Susan, given her physical condition, had her bad knee and a kidney aneurysm. And her documented medical fragility genuinely believed that if Owens got through that door and struck her, she would bleed out. The defense called three expert witnesses on the final day. Two focused on ballistics and crime scene reconstruction. Joshua Wright, a former Florida Department of Law Enforcement forensic technologist, a very long title, presented his analysis of the trajectory of the bullet, the location of the shell casing on the kitchen counter, and his conclusion that Susan was standing approximately 12 to 15 feet from the door, holding the gun near the top of her head with two hands when she fired. The defense used this to argue that she was not standing directly behind the door trying to kill AJ but was further back. In a defensive posture, so clearly she was scared. And the third expert testified on the use of forced decision-making under stress. He had a doctorate in educational psychology, but was not a licensed psychiatrist or psychologist. And the judge had already ruled that a defense expert on Susan's specific mental state during the confrontation could not testify because he lacked the proper qualifications. The prosecution had one significant structural hurdle beyond the evidence itself. To convict, they needed all six jurors. The defense only needed one. And their strategy from the beginning was to create a sliver, just a sliver of a doubt. They needed one person on that jury to believe that Susan's fear was reasonable. They didn't get one. The jury deliberated for two hours and they returned with a unanimous verdict, guilty. Guilty on manslaughter with a firearm. Sentencing took place not long after. There were witnesses called to help Susan after losing this case because she didn't want everything to be on record where she would get the worst possible outcome in her sentencing. Judge Robert Hodges acknowledged Susan's documented history of abuse and mental health struggles. He considered everything that came in and every word that was stated. But he didn't treat Susan's abuse or mental health struggles as a mitigating factor. Instead, he called the shooting completely unnecessary and returned to the sequence everyone had now heard in full. She was behind a locked door. Deputies were on the way and she knew that. She chose to retrieve a gun instead of waiting. And that is why those 150 seconds mattered so much in this case. So he sentenced her to 25 years. She will not be eligible for release until April 8th, 2048. Pamela Dias, when asked about Susan's apology, said it was not sincere. She said it was a last-ditch effort just to save herself. And in September of 2025, Susan gave an interview from the prison. She maintained that she had been terrified and that she had never even seen the shot. She said that it made her sick to be called capable of manslaughter, and she's appealing her conviction. But here's the worst part. She also filed notice of intent to countersue Owens' surviving children for slander, libel, and defamation of character. The same children who were there when their mother was shot, who were called those racial slurs, who had things thrown at them, who had her gun waved at them, those children. Which brings us back to the psychology here, because while Dr. Castillo's diagnosis of chronic PTSD is... Clinically sound. It is supported by evidence. It's completely real. So that does mean that with Susan's history, she does genuinely perceive threat more intensely. She would escalate very rapidly as soon as that response is activated. But that diagnosis is not an answer as to why she would do what she did, because the reality is PTSD determines the sensitivity and the speed of a threat response. It doesn't determine who you perceive as threatening. There was nothing that was documented in her life that would cause her to specifically. Target Black individuals as being the threat. And the research on racial bias and threat perception is extensive and consistent. Black individuals and Black children specifically are systematically undocumented to be perceived as more dangerous than white individuals in equivalent situations. This operates largely below conscious awareness. It runs in the same fast automatic systems as traumatic threat responses. When a hyperactivated threat detection system meets an unconsciously radicalized sense of who constitutes danger, what you get is a person whose alarm is set to trip pretty easily and whose alarm has been culturally calibrated to trip in a specific direction. Susan called those kids the N-word. She called them horrible things. She waved a gun at them, which I've said many times, but. It's insane that this woman was able to say and do all of those things, and it wasn't even allowed in court. And the reason she did all of that was because they were playing outside, not because they were doing anything towards her. They were just playing, and that's documented. She was the aggressor. They never did anything. Her fear was not reasonable. Her mental state did not explain it. Prejudice does. Hate for someone's skin color explains it. That's why A.J. Owens was laid to rest on June 12, 2023, at Meadowbrook Church in Ocala. And why the funeral lasted three hours. Because she was beloved. Because she was a good mom. To children who no longer have her and have to be raised by their grandmother. But their grandmother is there with them in Ocala and has been there since the day that she found out that her daughter was killed. The case of Susan resists simple framing and it should. It's not a clean story about a racist who killed a black woman and got what she deserved, though race is absolutely central to it, as I had just stated. But it's not a clean story about traumatized women who were failed by every system around her and could not help what happened because of the trauma. What it is is a documentary of what happens when unaddressed childhood trauma, untreated PTSD, and absorbed racial bias and access to firearms, along with a legal framework that asks only whether fear felt real, rather than whether it was racially calibrated all exist in the same person at the same moment. In other words, it was a perfect storm. And this is what happens when you bring in laws the way that they have without clarification and with people who are greatly prejudiced along with already having mental health issues and no actual gun laws to stop these things from happening. This case asks, whose fear we make legitimate? It asks what a law built on reasonable fear is actually protecting when fear is not neutral. It asks what we owe children who watch their mother collapse on a doorstep and who have spent every day since trying to understand why. It insists we stop looking away from those questions. AJ deserved to go home that night. Her children deserved to keep their mother. And a system that could not prevent what happened to them has a great deal it still has not answered for. This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions. And I'm your host, Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind. Hey, it's Kaitlyn. If you stayed this long, a big thank you. And if you could do one more thing, could you like and subscribe every time you listen to GBRLIFE transmissions? That would mean the world, and it would really help GBRLIFE grow. Also, don't forget to check out the reviews and blogs and so much more on gbrlife.com. I can't wait to see you there. Breath between the words we choose Stories in the space.