Ajike "AJ" Owens Photo: via Twitter
Friday, June 2, in an apartment complex in Ocala, Florida, Ajike Owens, an unarmed Black woman, was shot and killed by a white neighbor. Once again, an unarmed Black person just trying to live her life was shot dead by a white racist. And once again, the initial response of “law enforcement” was to treat it as “self-defense” and allow the killer to remain free… and armed.
It took four days of truth-telling and protest by neighbors and family—breaking through the media whitewash—before the shooter was finally arrested on manslaughter with a firearm and other charges on Tuesday, June 6.
And the whole ugly history of the U.S.—from slavery to lynchings, from police murders to increasingly common “vigilante” killings—teaches us that an arrest is no guarantee of accountability. The whole system is set up so that most of the time, all a cop or a racist vigilante has to do is claim “I was afraid,” and they are likely to walk free—as happened when George Zimmerman murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. And in 68 percent of the successful self-defense claims, the person killed was unarmed.1
The Murder
Ajike “AJ” Owens, 35 years old with four young kids, lived near Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman. Lorincz had a years-long history of harassing neighborhood kids for playing in a field near her home. She would call them names—“nigger,”2 “slaves,” and “retarded”—lean on her car horn for minutes at a time, even threaten them with violence. Phyllis Wills, a white woman with a Black child, who lived across the street, referred to Lorincz as a “monster.” Some parents wouldn’t let their children play outside for fear of her.3
Sheriff’s deputies were called to the neighborhood 12 times since January 2021. Apparently, most or all of these calls were from Lorincz, complaining about kids playing. She was told multiple times that they were in a public area and had every right to be there. But it seems the deputies never warned her to stop her racist harassment of children.
On Friday, Lorincz had reportedly thrown a pair of skates at one of AJ’s kids, injuring his foot, swung an umbrella and stolen an iPad from them. According to the family, Ajike’s nine-year-old son told his mom what happened. AJ did what any concerned parent might do—with her son, she knocked on Lorincz’s door and called for her to come out and talk to them.4
Lorincz’s response was to shoot her—one bullet through the closed door, into her chest. AJ collapsed. Her son shouted to neighbors that his mom had been shot. A neighbor ran over to do CPR. All four of AJ’s kids gathered around. But AJ died a little later in the hospital, leaving her kids motherless and traumatized.
The Whitewash
Marion County sheriffs arrived quickly on the scene, responding to a “trespassing” call. Finding an unarmed dying Black woman, and a white woman armed with a weapon she had just fired, did they disarm her and take her into custody? NO! Instead, they treated her ludicrous claim of “self-defense” as a valid explanation, and left with hardly any investigation and without making an arrest.
Then they developed a narrative for the media (which was widely repeated) that the shooting was the “culmination” of a “long-running feud” between the two women. In this narrative, “aggressiveness” on both sides led to the shooting, and racism didn’t figure in to the story at all.
The sheriff also argued that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law meant that he had to assume that the shooting was self-defense, and he could not even make an arrest until the self-defense claim was proven false.
“Stand Your Ground” laws in general should really be renamed “Legal Lynching” laws, or “Black People Have No Rights that White People Are Bound to Respect” laws. Time and again, they have been used to legally justify and acquit racist murderers. And for the cops, they are just reinforcing the attitude they had before these laws came along—it’s just SOP, standard operating procedure.
But even “Stand Your Ground” may not be enough to whitewash this murder.5
People Speak Out
In the face of the lies and distortions being promoted, multiple neighbors and family members—adults and kids, white and Black—told the truth to individual reporters, at press conferences, and finally in a protest at the courthouse. What comes through from what people in the neighborhood say is that this was not a “feud” between two “aggressive” people. This was a loving parent getting murdered for trying to deal reasonably with someone consumed with dangerous racism and hatred of kids in general.6
Finally, even the sheriff—after declaring that Stand Your Ground “is a great law”—had to arrest Lorincz, admitting that “this situation is a prime example of when [Stand Your Ground is] not justified.” But what he should have said was “This situation” turned into one in which “we couldn’t sweep the murder of an innocent Black woman under the rug.”
The Making of a “Stand Your Ground” Defense
Since the killing, Lorincz has blatantly tried to shape it as “self-defense” but keeps getting caught in lies.
- Lorincz stated that she bought the handgun with which she shot Owens a year ago after an “altercation” with her. But Lorincz later acknowledged that while she and Owens “were not friendly, there was never any threats of violence against her.”
- She claimed that she feared she was in “mortal danger” and that Owens was threatening to kill her, but no one else heard this. And, according to authorities, “moments after” Owens arrived at Lorincz’s house, she was “shot through the door when she was knocking on it.”
- She told deputies that Owen’s behavior was not “reasonable or prudent.” Later she admitted that she had done research on Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which identifies those as key elements of a “self-defense” plea.7
The Time Has Come…
So once again, the same question, written in innocent blood and voiced by orphaned children and grieving loved ones, screams out to us: How much longer can we tolerate a system in which white supremacist bullying, intimidation and violence is the norm, and even a fleeting taste of justice is the rare exception?
As Bob Avakian put it, “Let’s get down to basics. We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.” (from BAsics 3:1)
