Florida woman set to stand trial for fatal shooting of neighbor Ajike Owens

(NEW YORK) — Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the trial of Susan Lorincz, the Florida woman who is charged with fatally shooting her neighbor Ajike “AJ” Owens, a Black mother of four, in 2023 amid a dispute with Owens’ children.

“The remembrance of it is very painful,” Pamela Dias, Owens’ mother, said during a June 2 gathering at Immerse Church in Ocala to commemorate Owens’ life on the one-year anniversary of the fatal shooting.

“You feel this emptiness, this void that nothing can complete, and then you couple that with the fact that you have four babies who have lost their mother,” Dias added.

The charges

Susan Lorincz, who is white, was arrested on June 6, 2023, and charged with first-degree felony manslaughter, which is punishable by up to 30 years in prison if she is convicted, according to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. She was also charged with culpable negligence, battery and two counts of assault, but those lesser charges have since been dropped, according to court records.

Lorincz pleaded not guilty on July 10, 2023. She was held on a $150,000 bond and has remained in custody since her arrest last year. Lorincz’s attorney, Amanda Sizemore, previously declined to comment on the charge her client is facing and did not immediately return a request for comment from ABC News ahead of the trial.

Over the past year, Owen’s family has repeatedly called on prosecutors to upgrade the charge against Lorincz to second-degree murder, but Florida State Attorney William “Bill” Gladson said in a June 26, 2023 statement that there was insufficient evidence to prove a murder charge in court.

“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,” Gladson said.

With jury selection set to begin, ABC News reached out to Owens’ family and their attorney, Anthony Thomas, for further comment.

What the video shows

According to a June 6, 2023 statement from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, Lorincz allegedly shot Owens through a closed door in the presence of her now 10-year-old son after the mother of four went to speak with Lorincz about a dispute over Owens’ children playing near her home.

Ahead of Lorincz’s trial, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office released video on June 10, 2024, of Lorincz’s two-hour interrogation, which took place four days after the fatal shooting.

Lorincz claimed in her interview with detectives that she was acting in self-defense when she shot Owens.

“She was saying ‘I’m going to kill you,'” Lorincz claimed in the video.

“No one that we’ve interviewed so far has made any statements about her saying that she wanted to kill you,” one of the detectives told Lorincz.

Body camera footage released on July 3, 2023 by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office showed seven incidents between Feb. 25, 2022, and April 25, 2023 in which Lorincz called sheriff’s deputies to complain about neighborhood children, including Owens’ children, playing near her home.

The body camera videos also show a child alleging in comments to sheriff’s deputies that Lorincz called the children in the neighborhood “the N-word” and another who accused Lorincz of being “racist.”

During the interrogation, Lorincz repeatedly denied using racial slurs towards Owens and her children on the night of the shooting, but according to a police report, Lorincz admitted to calling children in the neighborhood the N-word and other derogatory terms in the past.

“I do not have a comment at this time,” Sizemore told ABC News on July 3, 2023, when asked to comment about the release of the body camera footage and the allegation that Lorincz called the children the “N-word.”

Owens’ family also called on Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and the U.S. Department of Justice in July 2023 to review the case and consider whether the shooting was a hate crime.