Bodycam Doc Tackles ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws

When Ajike “AJ” Owens went to Susan Lorincz’s door on June 2, 2023, the confrontation was one in a series of years-long disagreements between the two neighbors. 

Lorincz, 58 at the time, and Owens, 35, lived in a housing complex in Ocala, Florida, a small community of duplexes filled with young families. Many of the kids in the neighborhood played in a small grassy patch next to Lorincz’s home, starting small pickup games and activities in the open land. Lorincz, who is white, hated loud noise, and called police and first responders multiple times over the years claiming the children were trespassing, bothersome, threatening, and a nuisance. Several of the children referred to her as a racist and a “Karen,” telling their parents she called them the n-word. “This is just ridiculous,” Lorincz said on a 911 call around 8:54 that June night. “The [kids] just keep badgering me and badgering me. I’m just sick of these children. Now that they’re home from school, it’s like, craziness.” After the several children told their parents that Lorincz had yelled at them and thrown a pair of roller blades at a 10-year-old, Owens, a Black mother of four, walked over to Lorincz’s and knocked loudly on the door, demanding she come outside. Two minutes later, authorities received a second call from Lorincz, this time saying she had shot a woman through her locked front door. “I didn’t know what to do,” Lorincz cried on the 911 call. “I thought she was gonna kill me.”

When police arrived, Owens was unresponsive. Neighbors had tried unsuccessfully to perform CPR. Medical experts later pronounced her dead at the hospital. Lorincz was taken into police custody but quickly released after giving her testimony, citing that she only pulled the trigger because she was afraid for her life. Her defense — that she was “scared” Owens was going to kill her — took language directly from Florida’s stand your ground law, which allows residents to use deadly force in their home if they fear for their lives. This statute exists in some form in almost 30 states according to Everytown Research and has been used in some of the most prominent court cases in the past two decades. This includes the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17; the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery, 25; and 2023 shooting of Ralph Yarl, 16 — all of which were cases of white men shooting Black teens and young adults because they considered them threats. In Netflix’s new documentary The Perfect Neighbor, out Oct.17, director Geeta Gandbhir walks viewers through the circumstances of Owens’ death. Stand your ground laws were touted as a way to keep people safe. How did it leave four kids without their mom? 

“I’m a documentary filmmaker. Curiosity drives us,” Gandbhir tells Rolling Stone. “And I felt really compelled to understand how this could happen. How did we get from a trivial dispute about children playing in a yard near Susan’s house to her picking up a gun and [killing] AJ? How could this happen?” 

While the Perfect Neighbor begins with the police response to the shooting,  viewers are given almost a chronological retelling of the escalating arguments that ended in Owens death — all from the perspective of police body camera footage. There is no overlying narration from witnesses or law experts. Instead, police conversations are a constant, accompanied by dozens of filmed interactions with Lorincz and her neighbors by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. There are interviews with Lorincz, statements from people in the neighborhood, filmed testimony from children as they ride their bikes and  play kickball, and conversations between deputies themselves calling Lorincz’s responses’ overblown. But even after multiple deputies and police officers encouraged Lorincz to leave the children alone — and asked the children to involve their parents instead of responding to Lorincz directly — the conflicts continued. “Is there anything I can do with these people?” Lorincz asked police during one of dozens of 911 calls. “Because they’re getting ridiculous. I don’t bug anybody. I’m a single woman. I work from home. I’m peaceful. I’m like the perfect neighbor.” 

The Perfect Neighbor takes a frank — if not uncomfortable — approach to Owens’ shooting, including clips of Owens’ children begging for aid, neighbors attempting to do 911 before first responders take over, and the heartbreaking moment when Owen’s mother, Pamela Dias, and Owens’ children are informed she has succumbed to her injuries. “Hearing Pamela on the phone, to me, is the hardest part to bear,” Gandbhir says. “There’s an expectation that children will outlive their parents, but as a parent, you never want to outlive your child.” But it also includes police footage of the protests and interviews that happened after Owens’ death, including Lorincz’s statement, all focused around Florida’s controversial stand your ground law. 

Stand your ground laws and their complicated history

Most stand your ground laws center around justifiable uses of force, according to Cynthia Godsoe, a professor of criminal law at Brooklyn Law School. Also referred to as a type of castle doctrine, these laws require that people fulfill certain criteria — like being physically on their inside their homes and being in fear of their life — before they can be legally justified in using a weapon to protect themselves. In the past two decades, dozens of states have expanded these laws to also include private property generally — meaning you could successfully use a stand your ground law just by being inside your property line and feeling threatened rather than in your home. However, research has shown that stand your ground laws not only increase rates of violence and homicides in states that implement them, but are disproportionately used against people of color. According to a 2022 study, stand your ground laws were associated with an eight percent increase in monthly homicide rates in states that have them. A Tampa Bay Times investigation into over 200 cases that cited stand your ground laws found that people were more likely to escape prosecution if their victim was Black. Owens was a Black mother shot by a white woman through a locked door, mirroring similar national cases where Black individuals were shot under stand your ground laws while doing things like jogging or ringing unfamiliar doorbells. 

“With stand your ground laws, it kind of shifts the burden of proof. Normally, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone did something, in this case, manslaughter,” Godsoe explains. “But once you assert self defense like this, it almost smears the victim. The prosecution has to prove that this person was not actually scary. And this is where race plays in. Because we know with systemic racism, people will interpret threats from Black people more broadly. So now we’ve deputized people across the country who are gun owners to take things into their own hands.” 

Roughly two months after Owens’ death, Gandbhir and her producers filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, asking for police body camera footage associated with the case. They were given over 30 hours of material on a thumbdrive, dash cam footage, body camera recordings, and clips from community Ring cameras, all of which were jumbled, out of date, and often missing the associated audio. Gandbhir describes it as a “huge process,” to make sense out of the material, but after she was able to put it in chronological order, she realized the body camera footage offered a perspective often missing from typical true-crime documentaries. 

“When there is a terrible crime in this country, when it comes to gun violence, unfortunately you only really ever see the aftermath. You see the grieving family. Maybe you see the funeral. You see people talking to the news,” she says. “But in this [body cam] footage, we had two years leading up to the incident in which you saw this beautiful little community living together, loving each other that the police inadvertently went in and captured all. And that footage is undeniable, because there was no one there on the ground directing anything. No reporter, no journalist. I wasn’t there. Nothing else is influencing them. And you see what happened play out in real time.” 

In Owens’ case, community members protested after the shooting until Lorincz was arrested. In Aug. 2024, Lorincz was found guilty of first-degree felony manslaughter with a firearm. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where she remains. In his ruling, Judge Robert Hodges said that shooting was based “more in anger than in fear.” Members of Owens’ family were present when Lorincz received her sentence, footage of which plays during the final credits scene of The Perfect Neighbor. The film’s debut on Netflix is the first time audiences will be able to see it since its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it took home the directing award for U.S. Documentary. For Gandbhir, while the release of the film feels like a full circle moment in honoring Owens’ life, she hopes people who watch the documentary will learn just how dangerous stand your ground laws have made life for many Americans. “Ajike should still be with us today,” Gandbhir says. “But in her absence, it’s our goal that we fulfill her dream by making change. We hope the world will remember her name.”