Monday, October 22, 2024 - An American woman who laughed as she filmed her boyfriend suffocating to death was ‘justified in her actions’, a jury was told.
Sarah Boone appeared on Friday, October 18 at a court in
Orlando, Florida charged with the second degree murder of her partner Jorge
Torres, who was found dead in a suitcase at their apartment in February 2020.
The 46-year-old woman claims the two of them were playing a
drunken game of ‘hide and seek’ when Torres, 42, willingly got into the
suitcase.
She told police she ended up falling asleep while he was in
there and woke in the morning to find him dead.
In his opening statement on Friday, Boone’s defence lawyer,
James Owens, said Boone did not mean to kill her partner, but wanted a ‘captive
audience’ after he repeatedly abused her throughout their three-year
relationship.
He said she was ‘justified in the actions she took’.
Assistant state attorney William Jay, who is prosecuting,
said that Boone acted with ‘malicious intent to punish him and then she went up
to sleep and left him to take his final breaths on this Earth alone’.
Part of the prosecution’s case is a video filmed by Boone in
which Mr Torres can be heard pleading from the suitcase, ‘Sarah, I can’t
breath’ a number of times.
Boone, a mum of one, can be he heard giggling and says, ‘For
everything you’ve done to me, for everything you’ve done to me. F*** you. F***
you. Stupid.’
She also compares him struggling to breath with her
allegedly being choked by him.
Owen, who is Boone’s ninth defence lawyer after several
other resigned due to’irreconcilable differences’, told the jury that both his
client and Mr Torres were alcoholics and as ‘down and out as you can be’.
Speaking about the abuse, he said: ‘Jorge Torres physically
abused Sarah Boone and she suffered from the effects, the psychological effects
that one suffers from repeat violence from an intimate partner.
He described Mr Torres as being jealous of Boone, adding:
‘When his level of intoxication gets to a certain level is when he gets sad,
moody and a lot of times eventually it involved forcible sex with Sarah Boone
or actual physical violence.’
Explaining how Torres became a ‘captive audience’ in the
suitcase, Owens said: ‘Physically, they’re the same size, but he’s much
stronger. If they got into a fistfight, he would win 100 times out of 100.
‘But she’s got him down, claims he can’t get up. He has to
sit and listen. It’s a unique form of physical restraint. So she lets him have
it, says things she shouldn’t say.’
Both Boone and Torres were previously arrested for battery
against each other.
The court later heard from Boone’s ex husband Brian Boone,
who said she called him drunkenly in the middle of the night.
He said he hadn’t paid much attention to what she was saying
as he wanted to get back to sleep and because she’d called him in this drunken
state on a number of occasions previously.
But when he phoned the following day to check if she’d be
looking after their now 13-year-old son, she told him she’d found Torres dead
and asked him to come over.
Boone, who lived close by, advised her to phone emergency
services, then got in his car and drove over to the apartment in Winter Park.
He said when he arrived she still hadn’t called police , so
he asked her again at which point she did.
She also told him that she and Mr Torres had been playing
‘hide and seek’ and she fell asleep while he was in the suitcase, the court
heard.
Mr Boones said he only went in as far as the hallway, at
which point he noticed Mr Torres’s feet sticking out in the living room.
He added that he decided to go and wait for the emergency
services in the car.
Before the trial begun Boone who is currently being held in
jail was offered a plea deal, which would have seen her receive a 15-year
prison sentence if she pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
She rejected the deal and will face a minimum sentence is
22-and-a-half years if convicted of second degree murder. The trial continues.
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