AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
On June 2, 2023, Ajike Owens walked across the street from her home in Ocala, Florida, and knocked on her neighbor's door.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: 911, what is the address of the emergency?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I think somebody just got shot.
RASCOE: Owens, who is Black, was shot and killed by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, who is white. It was a dispute that started with kids roller skates and a misplaced iPad.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: My neighbor has been screaming at the kids outside. And all of a sudden, I heard what, to me, sounded like a gunshot.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: It's the old lady that always calls the cops over here.
RASCOE: A new documentary, "The Perfect Neighbor," reconstructs the story, stitching together years of police body cam footage. Lorincz claimed she feared for her life, and initially, police let her go. Geeta Gandbhir directed "The Perfect Neighbor," and she joins us now. Thank you for being with us.
GEETA GANDBHIR: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: Tell us first about Ajike Owens. Who was she? And why did her life take such a tragic turn?
GANDBHIR: So Ajike Owens was a vibrant, vivacious, young mother of four. She was a single mom. She was a cheer mom. She was a football mom. She was the mom who took extra shifts at her job to make sure that her kids could go to private school. She was a great mother, but she also had a lot of her own big dreams. She wanted to be an entrepreneur. So that's who Ajike was.
And her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, was emboldened by stand your ground laws that exist in 38 states in the country and took matters into her own hands over a trivial dispute around children playing in a yard next to her house, where they had permission to be, and shot Ajike and killed her.
RASCOE: We only meet Ajike, I think, like, twice in the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: You saying you already know?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: That she called the police?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Yeah, 'cause I see you're on the phone.
RASCOE: What did you think of her having - like, us having so little interaction with her in this story?
GANDBHIR: Sure. So Ajike Owens - just to back up a little bit, there is a personal connection for myself and my team. Ajike Owens was a family friend, and originally, we did not plan to make a film. We were assisting the family with getting media coverage for the case. And about two months in, we received the body camera footage from the lawyers who were working with the family, Benjamin Crump and Anthony Thomas. They did a FOIA request. And we realized that Ajike was not in the footage that much, but we felt that she was well-represented through her community and through the detective interviews and through her children, who you see in the film.
And I think what the police inadvertently and unintentionally caught in this body camera footage is a portrait of this beautiful, tight-knit, multiracial community as they were before this terrible crime occurred. When crimes like this happen, we often only get to see the aftermath, which is the grieving family, perhaps the funeral, perhaps the trial. But in this, using the body camera footage, we were able to paint a portrait of what this place and what the people were like before the crime and how one outlier's access to a gun and her being emboldened by stand your ground laws changed everything in such a terrible way.
RASCOE: Tell us about that title, "The Perfect Neighbor," because as you talk about, this was a real community where most of the adults were looking out for all the kids. The kids are outside playing. But there was this one outlier who was complaining, and the police said she was the only one complaining about the kids.
GANDBHIR: Yeah. So I think what we saw in that community was a strong, tight social network, people raising their children together. There's a mother who comes out and says to the police when he asks her, which one of these children is yours?
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR")
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #1: Whose mom are you?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: They're all mine.
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #1: I'm sorry, no (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #2: [inaudible].
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #1: Hey.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: My kids aren't really here, but they're always outside playing with them.
GANDBHIR: And there's a father who comes out and says to the police, I look out for all these kids like they're my own. Susan Lorincz, as you mentioned, again, was an outsider in the sense that she moved into the community with the attitude that the community should change to fit her needs. And that is something that is reflected in her multiple calls to the police, where she, again, tries to weaponize the police against the community. She tries to weaponize her own privilege and also victimhood.
RASCOE: And Lorincz was using racial slurs against the children. She was...
GANDBHIR: Yes.
RASCOE: ...Using the N-word. So she was engaging in racist behavior, using racial slurs.
GANDBHIR: Correct. Correct. And that was well documented. And she - again, she admitted it to the police.
RASCOE: Yes. Well, talk to me about the stand your ground laws because I know you've mentioned them, and at the end of the film, you have some information about stand your ground laws like the one in Florida. What do you want viewers to know about these laws?
GANDBHIR: Sure. So stand your ground laws have been studied, and they exist in, I believe, 38 states. Basically, the law says that if you believe your life is imminent danger, you can defend yourself without the duty of having to retreat. This law emboldens people, and particularly, we see success in people using it to claim self-defense when they are white and the person who they, quote-unquote, "defend themselves from" is not.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR")
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: Have you ever heard of the term stand your ground?
SUSAN LORINCZ: Yes, I have.
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: Have you ever done any kind of research on that?
LORINCZ: Yes, when it was mentioned on - some guy shot someone at a convenience store, and they said stand your ground, that was.
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: Susan, I think you know the reason why I'm asking that question. You're smart, OK? And the reason is...
LORINCZ: Oh, hell no. No. Absolutely - I know what you're thinking. Did I look up the law so I could do something? No. Absolutely not.
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: This is not a situation where you set something up to...
LORINCZ: No. No.
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: ...Because you were tired of this person.
LORINCZ: No.
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: You were tired of...
GANDBHIR: The rate of homicide has increased about 11% because of this law being used. And another interesting point is that self-defense laws have always existed in this country, meaning that if you feel your life is in imminent danger, you can claim self-defense in a court. You don't need this additional layer of a predatory law to do so.
RASCOE: One of the hardest parts for me to watch was just seeing the effect of everything on Ajike Owens' kids. You know, I have my kids, and they're very loud, and they're screaming and running around all the time in our backyard. And hearing them feel guilt about what happened, that maybe it was their fault, it's - as a mother, you know that she would never feel that way. Do you know how they're doing now?
GANDBHIR: I just want to first address what you said about being a mother. And all of us who made the film, we are all parents. And that footage of the children hearing that they have lost their mother is incredibly painful. We know that we are asking the audience to bear witness to something that is very uncomfortable to watch.
And I think the thing that people are most disturbed by is not necessarily the violence in the film because we don't actually see the shooting. But what we see is the aftermath, and we see the grief, and grief is so hard to bear. But that grief is the true aftermath of gun violence.
And the children, again, they still get up every day and they go to school, and they have to carry on with their lives with this giant hole in their world, which is the loss of their mother. They are incredibly resilient, but it's a struggle. They are living with and working through the trauma, and it is an up-and-down process.
RASCOE: That was Geeta Gandbhir, director of the new documentary, "The Perfect Neighbor." It's out now on Netflix. Thank you so much for being with us.
GANDBHIR: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR鈥檚 programming is the audio record.
