Susan Lorincz called herself “the perfect neighbor” in police body camera footage shown on the Netflix documentary by the same name. But if you ask Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods, that was not the case.
“The only thing I always said is she was far from ‘the perfect neighbor,’” Woods said in a NewsNation interview published Wednesday, October 22.
Lorincz, 61, is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence after being found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of her Ocala, Florida, neighbor Ajike “AJ” Owens in 2022. Owens, who was a 35-year-old mother of four, had allegedly been knocking on Lorincz’s door, attempting to confront her about an incident between her and Owens’ kids. Lorincz fired a single shot through the locked door, which struck and killed Owens.
Lorincz was arrested four days later, though she insisted she feared for her life at the time. The shooting drew national attention and debate over Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which permits citizens to use potentially deadly force if they feel their life is threatened. There was a racial component as well, given that Lorincz is white and Owens and her kids are Black.
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Woods, for his part, does not believe the shooting was racially motivated.
“Do I believe that Lawrence was probably racist? There’s a very good possibility,” Woods said. “Do I think [the shooting] was racially motivated? Absolutely not.”
Regardless of her motive, the documentary is made primarily of police bodycam footage shot during Lorincz’s numerous calls to police in the years leading up to the shooting and on the night of the shooting itself. To Woods, that means there’s little room for anyone to distort the truth.
“It’s all body cameras. It’s all videos,” he said. “So you can’t really make up anything. You get to see the raw stuff of what my deputies dealt with on a regular basis.”
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The video, Woods believes, shows that while Lorincz was in her right to make those 911 calls, in which she would often complain about Owens’ kids trespassing or otherwise bothering her, the kids were doing nothing wrong. They were within their right to be playing on the patch of grass that she would often complain about and their disruptions didn’t rise to the level that law enforcement could do anything about it.
“These types [of] things are petty, these are things that are frivolous, here’s the truth, they’re kids,” he said. “That’s all it was. These are kids.”
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“It didn’t rise for us to be called every time but I do have a burden of responsibility when a citizen calls,” he said. “I think that’s what the show shows. It shows how my deputies did the right thing each and every time, explaining to her, ‘no, they’re perfectly fine. They’re kids.’ It’s tragic.”
Marion County police took heat at the time for waiting four days to arrest Lorincz — something highlighted on the documentary. Woods tried to clear up any misconceptions there, saying that in a stand your ground state, the “burden” is on law enforcement to first prove that the law does not apply to a given situation. The delay happened so police could gather evidence that a defense attorney could not dispute.
The Perfect Neighbor is streaming now on Netflix.
