Nothing could have prepared the residents of a quiet street in Florida for what unfolded on a balmy June night in 2023.
The road had long been the kind of place where families knew one another, children played outside and neighbours shared the ordinary rhythms of daily life.
That is, until reclusive Susan Lorincz, then 58, shot and killed 35-year-old mother-of-four Ajike “AJ” Owens. Living alone, Lorincz gradually became known among the kids as the “Karen” of the street – a term widely used to disparage a Caucasian woman, usually older, who polices others’ behaviour, inserts herself into people’s business and rarely misses an opportunity to complain.
The incident has since been revisited in Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor, which retraces the events through police bodycam footage, revealing how gradually visible tensions on the street escalated. When the story broke, it sparked national outrage and reignited debate around Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” gun laws.
What started it?
The tensions began two years earlier, in January 2021, when Lorincz started calling police repeatedly to report the Black neighbourhood children who hung out outside her rental home.
They would play football or tag near her door or her truck parked in the grassy vacant patch next door. Police visited often, advising the kids to avoid her yard, while reminding Lorincz that “kids will be kids”.
It seemed fairly harmless at first, just another classic tale of a disgruntled neighbour. Lorincz put up “No Trespassing” signs and shouted at the children from her doorway. Eventually, however, the complaints gave way to something far uglier.
“Everybody in this neighbourhood has feuded with this lady over our children,” Phyllis Wills, a long-time resident of the area, told NBC News.
“Every time they’ve went even in the patch of grass over there, she would be like, ‘Get off of my lawn, you b—h or you retards or you N-word.’ She would wave guns at them.”
The night of the incident
Things finally reached boiling point on June 2, 2023. That evening, a group of kids, including some of Ajike’s children, were playing in the field next to Lorincz’s apartment when she started yelling. Ajike’s son Israel, then 9, realised his electronic tablet was missing and accused Lorincz of taking it.
Her alleged response was to hurl a rollerskate at him, hitting his foot. His older brother, Isaac, then 12, stepped in, challenging her, and Lorincz responded by swinging an umbrella at him.
At 8.54pm, she placed her first 911 call of the night, while the boys ran home to tell their mother what had happened.
“I’ve got kids trespassing. Leaving all their toys around. Just screaming, yelling, just being absolutely obnoxious,” Lorincz said about the children, according to the 911 tape. “I went and threw the rollerskate over to the other side – the kid says he’s going to beat me up for that, and he’s mouthing off to me. I feel threatened in my own home.”
The police dispatcher suggested she stay inside and lock her doors while officers made their way there. Then, just minutes later, police received reports of shots being fired and Lorincz placed another call.
“Oh, my God. This lady just tried to break down my door. I shot through the door. Oh, my God,” she told the dispatcher.
Ajike was shot in the right side of her chest through Lorincz’s front door, while one of her young sons stood beside her. She had gone over to confront the woman and “knocked on the door multiple times”. Ajike died later that night in the hospital.
What happened after the shooting?
After the shooting, Lorincz claimed she acted in self-defence under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows residents to use deadly force to protect or defend against imminent threat of death, delaying her arrest.
However, at her trial, prosecutors convinced the jury the force was unjustified, and she was found guilty of manslaughter. In November 2024, she was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
“I am so sorry I took AJ’s life. I never intended to kill her,” she said at the time of her sentencing.
Ajike’s mother, Pam Dias, told Central Florida Public Media she didn’t believe her, saying her “apology was a last-ditch attempt to save herself”, adding, “It wasn’t sincere. She never showed remorse.”
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help raise funds for her four young children that she left behind.
