Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary, The Perfect Neighbor is a film made out of unbridled necessity. The film tells the story of the murder of Ajike Owens at the hands of her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, which occurred in Ocala, Florida, and triggered national debate over racial discrimination and gun violence.
Over several months, a neighborhood dispute is taken too far by Lorincz, including a blatantly racist name-calling (what the children in the case refer to as the b-word, the p-word, and the n-word, going so far as to explain that Lorincz would routinely call them “little slaves”). Lorincz’s unproven claims that her neighbor’s children were attempting to break into her car and rob her formed a part of this one-sided tirade, with Lorincz harassing the children by videotaping them. The culmination occurred on June 2nd, 2023, when Lorincz fatally shot through a door, killing Owens, claiming she was in fear for her life. As police reveal during her questioning, however, her original call of complaint about a disturbance with the children, and then the call she made to say she had shot through the door and killed someone, were made exactly two minutes apart. She knew that officers were on their way to respond to the scene, and still made a knee-jerk reaction towards execution-style violence.
To tell this story with unflinching truth and the utmost care, director Geeta Gandbhir made the decision to use 911 call logs (in chronological order) and body cam footage in an effort to subvert a form often used to surveil and bring harm to communities of color. We see it all, from Lorincz’s first complaint about a noise disturbance to the trivial and obviously fabricated stories about children with a vendetta against her (they dared to play outside in the grass near her front door), and ultimately to the multiple 911 calls made the night of Owens’s death. Already a storied documentarian, Gandbhir went to Ocala to film and talk to those involved herself because her sister-in-law was best friends with Ajike Owens, and she feared that the local authorities and general media coverage would write the case off as an example of Florida’s infamous “stand your ground” laws.
To me, the most powerful part of any case involving a death is the shocking horror of the grief of those close to the victim. One of the most haunting visuals I’ve ever seen in a documentary is the body cam footage from the night Ajike Owens died: as the officer pulls their car up to the neighborhood, their body camera glimpses the group of adults and children alike who have run out into the dark, oak-laden Florida street in the dead of night and are jumping and screaming and pointing to where Owens is lying unconscious, receiving CPR from a neighbor. You watch her children become actively traumatized; they were the first ones to wander out of their house after hearing the gunshots and face the horrific indignity of Lorincz leaving Owens’ body there, her kids needing help to drag her across the street for care.
The neighbors — renters from all walks of life — band together. This is the Southern spirit: the idea of being kind even when you can’t be nice. They sweep in and take in Owens’s children as they panic and beg the officer to just let them see their mom move. The officer eventually has to break the news of her death to their father, who then enlists the officers’ assistance in breaking the news to his children. Raw grief in real, unflinching, unedited time. To not be interrupted by an infographic, talking head, or statistic once, and to have to force yourself to be a present spectator to the visceral carnage of the loss of Owens is deeply effective, and gives agency back to those involved by not misconstruing their pain. Even more so, it lets a part of you hold this family in the still-sudden wake of this immense tragedy.
In Florida, “stand your ground” laws came into effect in 2005. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the law “allows individuals to use lawful force, including deadly force, in self-defense without a duty to retreat if they reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent imminent death, great bodily harm, or a forcible felony. It applies anywhere a person has a legal right to be.” I spent my childhood and adolescence as a resident of Polk County, Florida, located two hours from where Owens’s murder occurred. I was unaware of her case until seeing the documentary, but a sense of kinship with the residents you meet throughout the film felt inevitable for me: jean shorts and tank tops, moms screaming at their kids to come inside at sunset, running free on the patch of sweltering road in front of your house because you’re a kid and your state is so hot it feels like it’s on fire, and the world feels contained to the row of houses you exist in for most of your life.
Central Florida is a place of deep conservatism woven into the fabric of the South: sex was publicly chastised there, and I did not see a pack of condoms in a store until I later moved to Boston. It was obviously occurring, though, my county being 22nd in the state for the highest teen pregnancy rates. Whereas something as normal as sex was a disgusting taboo to never be spoken of outside of the quiet corners of a classroom or park, guns were a point of pride for many people: which kinds, how many, how they hunted. A weapon that could only take life felt more agreeable to vox populi than the consent, safety, and well-being of the women who make life. As the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reports, when looking at US states, there has been an 8–11% increase in homicide-related deaths, which chalks up to roughly 700 more killings a year. A key conclusion the research draws is that “stand your ground” laws, originally enacted to reduce crime rates, have actually increased them. Burglary has not decreased, but gun violence and gun-enacted homicides have grown in communities like the South, which are already deeply disenfranchised enough thanks to gerrymandering.
The terrifying byproduct of “stand your ground” laws is not only the increase in gun ownership and violence, but the encouraged reflex for violence, the narcissistic pride in believing your life matters so much you may kill another just for being “too close,” and the mass desensitization of interpersonal violence. To say that the killing of Owens was senseless would be, to me, to ignore the very ways in which perpetrators of racial violence rationalize their dehumanization and killing. Owens’s death was unjustifiable, disgustingly cruel, dehumanizing — and the product of one woman’s deeply held racism towards not just Owens but the entire group of residents (children included) in her neighborhood.
Ajike Owens seemed magnetic; she had an infectious laugh she passed on to her four kids, and dreams of being able to own a home and manage a local restaurant. I wish more than anything that her children still had their mother around. I wish her friends could call her on days good and bad. And I wish that she could be around to see all the seeds of progress, however slowly germinating, that have been planted in her honor.
The Perfect Neighbor is now streaming on Netflix, with a portion of the film’s licensing fee going to Pamela Dias (Akije Owens’s mother) and Owens’s four children. Dias has gone on to cofound the Standing in the Gap Fund, which is dedicated to advocating against racial violence, for community healing and resilience, and to support the families and communities affected by these laws.
