Stand Your Ground Laws Shake Up the Case
Accordingly, Lorincz tried to position her behavior as self-defense. When speaking to detectives, Lorincz invoked Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, first enacted in 2005. Detectives later stated that Lorincz’s actions were not justifiable under the law, and jurors agreed.
Stand your ground laws drastically changed the rules of self-defense in Florida and made it more difficult to prosecute homicides. Florida was the first U.S. state to adopt such a law, but today, they’re on the books in 28 other states, including, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah.
Long before the new mandate, citizens had a duty to retreat to safety unless already inside their own home, University of Miami law professor Tamara Lave tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
Defending oneself with lethal force in the Sunshine State, Lave explains, also required a “subjective and reasonable belief the deadly force was necessary, to protect you or a third party from death or great bodily injury.”
Stand your ground laws essentially “removed the duty to retreat outside your home,” and added a provision, justifying deadly force “to stop someone from unlawfully entering a residence,” Lave says.
According to Lave, Lorincz “claimed [Owens] was trying to enter her house, but witnesses said she only ever knocked on the door. If there had been actual evidence [Owens] was trying to open the door to the house, then there would have been a presumption she was reasonable in using deadly force.”
‘An Unnecessary Shooting’
Witnesses further verified Owens never uttered anything about killing anyone.
“[Lorincz] said she was afraid [Owens] was going to kill her, and that’s why all of the evidence in the case came down to whether that was a reasonable fear or not,” Lave says. “She makes this claim while she’s behind a heavily deadlocked door.”
Lave notes that an unfortunate consequence of stand your ground is that people may use it to try and get away with murder.
“People know about stand your ground, so to what extent did this law play a role in this woman thinking it was okay to shoot and kill her neighbor, and think she could get away with it?” Lave asks. “It was an unnecessary shooting, so what made her do it? What role did this law play in this?”
Lorincz claimed during her trial that she never meant to kill Owens. "I'm so sorry that I took AJ's life,” she said to Owens’s loved ones. “I never intended to kill her.”
Lave credits eyewitnesses with the ability to get Lorincz convicted in a case when the Stand Your Ground law might have otherwise prevailed. “Imagine there were no witnesses at the time,” she says. “If the facts were the same, but no one had seen it or heard it, the presumption would’ve been that she acted correctly, and the case probably wouldn’t have gone forward.”
A Neighbor’s Perspective
Former Ocala resident Sharna Mozell recalls the neighborhood children often played outside as all the adults watched from their front porches. The only person who ever seemed to have a problem with the neighborhood kids was Lorincz.
“She was a hateful lady, always yelling and cussing at these kids, and she got mad at them all the time for making too much noise, but they’re kids,” Mozell, who is also a mother, recalls to A&E Crime + Investigation. “She would do little things to taunt the kids. She placed a camera in one of her windows, and aimed it at the street where they played basketball.”
Mozell claims Lorincz “would come outside and start recording” the children on her phone in order to “get their attention and get them to react.”
“She would flip them the bird behind the camera, just to get some nasty reaction out of them,” Mozell continues about Lorincz. “She called the police on them all the time for the noise.”
Lorincz confessed to detectives that she called the children “the N-word,” per a report from the Marion County Sheriff's Office. On the night of the shooting, one child told deputies that Lorincz “came out of her house and gave the children the middle finger” and said to them, “Get away from my house, you Black slave.”
Mozell says she moved out of Ocala soon after the shooting unfolded and claims everyone who’d been living in that family-filled neighborhood now lives elsewhere.
“It shook everybody up,” Mozell admits “When [the documentarian filmmakers] came to interview us about the shooting, they had trouble finding folks, because everybody had moved.”
Mozell strongly believes Lorincz went after Owens’s children in order to draw the devoted mother to her front door that fateful day: “My feeling is [Lorincz] lured [Owens] over there by cursing her kids out, throwing roller skates at them. She also broke their iPad. All she had to do was move to a 55-and-up community if the noise was too much.”
