Ajike “AJ” Owens was a dedicated 35-year-old mother of four when she was shot and killed by her 58-year-old neighbor, Susan Lorincz, in June 2023. The tragedy, which rocked the otherwise peaceful, tight-knit community of Ocala, Fla., followed years of Lorincz making habitual calls to the police to report neighborhood kids, including Owens’, for playing in a vacant lot next to her home. Lorincz, who is white, claimed that the children — most of whom are Black and were under 12 — were a threat, citing one of the nation’s many “Stand Your Ground” laws, which allow individuals to use deadly force to protect themselves if they feel their life is in danger.
Now award-winning filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir, with the support of producer-husband Nikon Kwantu and such nonfiction luminaries as Sam Pollard and Soledad O’Brien, has chronicled the two years leading up to Owens’ death in “The Perfect Neighbor,” premiering Friday on Netflix after an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run. Composed almost entirely of police body camera footage, the moving and powerful verité documentary uses the case to depict the perils of such laws, which are all too easily misused or abused in a society where not every claim of self-defense is treated equally.
A jury convicted Lorincz of manslaughter in August 2024, but the repercussions of her erratic and violent behavior continue to impact the Owens family and their neighbors. Gandbhir, whose sister-in-law was a close friend of Owens, hopes “The Perfect Neighbor” will honor Owens’ memory while showing how our nation’s growing fear of “the other” and the proliferation of Stand Your Ground laws are a deadly combination.
Initially you weren’t planning on making a film about this tragic killing, but you were documenting the aftermath of the crime. Why?
We got a call the night Ajike was killed, and we immediately jumped into action to try to help the family. We stepped in to be the media liaisons. They looked to us to try to keep the story alive in the media, just because they were worried [it would be overlooked]. This is Ocala, Fla., the heart of where Stand Your Ground was born. Susan wasn’t arrested for four days because they were doing a Stand Your Ground investigation. We were not thinking about making a doc, really. We were just terrified that there would be no justice.
That’s happened before …
Yes, Trayvon Martin’s case being the most notorious.
But in Ajike’s case, there’s reams of footage and audio recordings that captured what happened. How were you able to obtain so much of that material from the police department?
Anthony Thomas, who works with [civil rights attorney] Benjamin Crump, had sued the police department through the Freedom of Information Act and got them to release all of the material that they had pertaining to the case. That’s how we got the footage. What came to us was the police body camera footage, detective interviews, Ring camera footage and cellphone footage. There was also all the audio calls that Susan had made to the police, and then after the night of the [killing], the calls the community had made. There was basically a plethora of stuff that we were handed, in a jumble, and Anthony was like, “Sort this out. See if you can find anything that makes sense for the news, like snippets we can share.”
I was surprised at how much material there was, and I’m just talking about what made it into the film.
It speaks to how much Susan called the police. Basically, the body cam footage [was a result of those calls]. What’s interesting is the reaction when we screened the film for the community. They agreed to be part of this so we wanted to show them before it came out. We’re very concerned with participant care and the ethics of this. They said that they didn’t think that we had everything, because Susan [allegedly] called the police sometimes, like, 10 times a day. They [said they] think the police gave us maybe what they could organize, where they don’t look terrible. But they don’t think that that’s everything.
Ajike’s mother, Pamela Dias, has been a major force in keeping her daughter’s memory alive — and seeking justice. How did she feel about you making this film?
I went to Pamela and said I could make a movie and maybe we could make a change. It’s quite an endeavor to try to change gun laws or the Stand Your Ground law, but maybe we can reach people. She said yes. This is a woman who by her own admission was blinded by grief [when Ajike was killed], who said she couldn’t see two feet in front of her. But she knew even then that her daughter’s story had to be told. She said her daughter died standing up for her kids, and she felt it was her turn to stand up.
I told her the material was graphic. But Pam was inspired by Emmett Till and how his mother had an open-casket funeral and told the photographers to take pictures because she wanted the world to know what had happened to her baby. Plus we thought about George Floyd and [how footage of his killing] sparked a movement. It is a terrible thing to bear witness, but if we let these things continue to happen in the shadows, then they will happen forever. It’s only by bearing witness that things might change.
What about your own emotional well-being while making this film?
See all my gray hair? [Laughs.] I realized later it was grief work for me, because I needed to know what happened. I had to know what happened. I couldn’t understand how someone could pick up a gun and kill their neighbor over children playing nearby. How did we get here? So many questions were just eating me, so the work was in some ways cathartic. Then once we had it all strung out and I thought it was a film, I brought on Viridiana Lieberman, who’s our editor. We had a similar sensibility about what we wanted this to be and we really committed to living in the body camera footage.
Why not use narration?
I worked for 12 years in narratives and scripted before I segued into documentary. I learned that the best vérité documentaries are show and not tell. If you tell people what they’re seeing, there’s some room for doubt or for your bias or some questioning around it. But to me, this footage plays like vérité. There’s no reporter on the ground. There’s no one influencing what’s happening in the neighborhood, other than the police who are coming in and asking questions. I felt that made the footage and the story undeniable. No one could say that we were down there asking provocative questions. And the body camera footage is so incredibly immersive, I wanted people to have the experience of what the community experienced.
How would you describe what they went through?
Their experience felt a bit like a horror film. You have this beautiful, diverse community living together with a strong social network, taking care of each other and each other’s kids. What was so powerful to me in the body camera footage is you really got to see this community as they were before [the tragedy], and you never get that. There’s horrible shootings all the time, and we see the aftermath, right? We see the grieving family, we see the funeral. We have to re-create what their lives were like before. And in this, you see this beautiful community thriving and living together, and that was so profound. I wanted to rebuild their world so everyone could see the damage done by one outlier with a gun. How she was the only one who was repeatedly calling the police and seeing threats where there were none.
We’re used to seeing police body cam footage used as evidence following a police brutality incident, or as entertainment in true crime shows. It’s used to tell a very different story in your film.
I wanted to subvert the use of body cam footage. Body camera footage is a violent tool of the state. It’s often used to criminalize us, particularly people of color. It’s used to dehumanize us, to surveil us, to protect the police. What I wanted to do with this material was flip that narrative and use it to humanize this community.
Why do you think that Susan was not seen as a threat by the police?
She’s a middle-aged white lady. She weaponized her race, her status, and she kept trying to weaponize the police against the community. The fact that she was using hate speech against children [she allegedly called them the N word]. She was filming them. She was throwing things at them. She was cursing at them. But the police didn’t flag her as more than just a nuisance. … After the third time she called and it was unfounded and not about an actual crime, there should have been some measure taken to reprimand her. They didn’t tell the community that they could file charges against her: “She’s harassing you all. She’s harassing your children.” It was systemic neglect. And honestly, should the police be a catch-all for everything? Probably not. But they were not equipped. They didn’t take the necessary steps and the worst outcomes happened, which is that we lost Ajike, and Susan is in prison for the rest of her life. I’m sure that’s not the outcome she wanted.
There’s a moment in the film where a policeman knocks on Susan’s sliding glass door. She doesn’t know it’s a cop. She opens the curtain and screams at him in a terrifying, almost demonic voice. It’s quite a switch from her nervous, genial 911 calls.
Yeah, the jump scare. That was one of the moments where I was like, “Oh, there she is.” And the 911 call, after she shot Ajike. She was hysterical. Then her voice changes when she says, “They keep bothering me and bothering me, and they won’t f— stop.” I felt my heart clench, because it’s like, “Oh, there she really is.” She has this way of going between victim and aggressor. A little Jekyll and Hyde. It’s frightening.
The victim/aggressor dynamic is part of what makes Stand Your Ground laws so dangerous. They can be weaponized.
Stand Your Ground policy was born in Ocala and now it’s in around 38 states, in different forms. It’s a law that emboldens people to pick up a gun to solve a dispute. If you can other-ize your neighbor to the extent of [killing] them, the question is, what else will you do? What else will we tolerate? As human beings, how we show up in our communities is a reflection of how we show up in the world. This film takes place on this tiny street, but it is a microcosm of what is happening today. Susan represented the dangers, and that little community represented the best of what’s under threat.
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