In regards to court documents, the lady accused of shooting her neighbour during a fight involving her kids acknowledged previously calling the children racial epithets.
Thursday marked Susan Lorincz’s first court appearance since her Tuesday arrest. Ajike “AJ” Owens, a neighbour and mother of four children, was killed, and she was charged with manslaughter.
According to recently made public court records, Owens’ children, who range in age from three to twelve, and Lorincz, 58, have a long history of being “not friendly.”
Lorincz and Owens live across the street from one another in Ocala, Florida. Their homes are divided by a large field, where neighborhood children congregate to play.
The field is public property, but neighbors told investigators Lorincz acted like the yard belonged to her.
At one point in the past, Lorincz put up ‘no trespassing’ signs on the open field. In one previous report to the police, she claimed one of Owens’ children took down the sign and threw it at her.
According to the arrest affidavit, two of Owens’ children were playing basketball with other neighborhood friends in the street near Lorincz’s apartment on the night of their mother’s death.
One of the children realized they left an iPad on the ground, which they saw Lorincz had picked up. When they asked the woman to give the tablet back, she instead ‘approached him with an umbrella and started swinging it at him.’
Lorincz then threw a roller skate at the 10-year-old, which has since been collected for evidence by sheriff’s deputies.
According to the family’s attorney Ben Crump, Lorincz also threw the iPad at the boys, cracking the tablet’s screen.
The two boys then ran to get help from their mother. ‘Shortly after, the victim approached Lorincz’s door and banged on the door, yelling for Lorincz to throw something at her if she wanted to throw something,’ the affidavit states.
Lorincz shot Owens through her front door around 9.04pm, with a gun she said she purchased after previous interactions with the kids. She was transported to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 9.36pm.
The shooter told responding officers that Owens ‘banged on the door so hard everything started shaking,’ and thought to herself ‘Oh my god, she’s really going to kill me this time.’
Sheriff’s deputies then spent the next few days interviewing neighbors, both parents and children, trying to understand what happened and the history of Lorincz’s interactions with the family.
According to one parent, Lorincz was known to yell racial slurs, including the n-word, at children who played in the large field in front of her apartment.
Another parent told investigators ‘Lorincz is always yelling at the children who play in the area and calls in false reports on them.’
The same father also told investigators: ‘Lorincz is known to harass the children by video recording them with her phone as they play in the open field between the apartment buildings and that Lorincz believes the area belongs to her.’
One of the neighborhood kids playing with Owens’ children that night said they witnessed Lorincz give the children the middle finger and yell ‘Get away from my house, you black slave.’
Investigators eventually interviewed Lorincz a second time, asking her about inconsistencies in her story and attempting to get footage from a Blink doorbell camera installed on her doorway.
When detectives asked Lorincz about the allegations that she yelled racial slurs at the kids that night, she ‘admitted to having used the n-word toward children out of anger in the past and also to calling children other derogatory terms.’
After the interview, Lorincz was placed under arrest. At this point, she stopped cooperating with investigators – refusing to stand up, then telling deputies to ‘kill me.’
She was briefly hospitalized after her arrest when she nearly collapsed while being escorted to a patrol car.