A woman has been jailed for life for murdering her boyfriend by zipping him inside a suitcase and leaving him to die of suffocation, following what she said was a history of domestic and alcohol abuse.
Sarah Boone, 47, from Florida, told Orange County Sheriff’s Office detectives she and her partner Jorge Torres had been drinking heavily and playing hide-and-seek when they thought it would be fun if Torres, who weighed 7 stone, 3lbs (47kg) climbed into a large blue case in February 2020.
They had been drinking alcohol and she decided to go to sleep, she said, believing Torres could get out of the suitcase on his own at their home in Winter Park, Orlando.
When she woke up the next morning, and couldn’t find him, she remembered where he was, opened the case and found he was unresponsive. She rang 911 and was then arrested.
But videos found on her phone showed Torres, 42, shouted to her that he couldn’t breathe and kept calling out her name.
Prosecutor William Jay said she ignored his pleas because she wanted to “terrorise him” and then “struck him with a baseball bat”.
In the videos, she is heard saying: “Yeah that’s what you do when you choke me” and “Oh, that’s what I feel like when you cheat on me”.
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In court, Boone claimed she acted in self-defence as she felt threatened because of past violent incidents between them.
The defendant recalled a history of abuse by Torres, backed up by pictures of her with injuries.
At the sentencing hearing, members of the victim’s family said Torres’s death had torn them apart.
His sister, Victoria Torres, said Boone “deserves to rot in jail”, she has caused “a lifetime of pain”.
Boone, who has already spent 58 months in prison, was found guilty in October after a 10-day trial, having turned down the prosecution’s offer of a 15-year sentence if she admitted manslaughter.
She criticised the way her trial was handled and covered by the media, but also asked Torres’s family for forgiveness.
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She said she fell in love with “a monster” and though she tried to break away, she “never stopped loving him”.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen. Forgive me Jorge. Forgive me Torres family,” she said.
