Month: October 2025

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The Perfect Neighbor, out on Netflix on Oct. 17, is a documentary about a white Florida woman who shot and killed her neighbor, a Black mother of four in 2023, pieced together using footage from police body cameras.

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There are no talking heads, just two year’s worth of recordings of police interacting with the shooter, 60-year-old Susan Lorincz—who frequently made complaints about local kids being loud while playing in a vacant lot near her Ocala, Fla., home—as well as body cam footage of interviews with her neighbors. In 2024, Lorincz was found guilty of manslaughter with a firearm and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Here’s how a community dispute escalated into a deadly tragedy.

A “fearful” neighbor

Lorincz repeatedly called police to report loud neighborhood kids who she said were “trespassing,” constantly screaming at her, telling her to shut up, and threatening to kill her. Lorincz would tell police that she was being attacked, “fearing for her life.” In the film, viewers will see recordings she would take of the kids playing so that she could show them to police. The movie’s title The Perfect Neighbor comes from a comment Lorincz made to the police, “I’m like the perfect neighbor.”

The footage reveals that officers repeatedly responded to Lorincz’s calls with skepticism because she was the only resident with these complaints. The children were not technically playing on Lorincz’s property; they were playing in her next door neighbor’s yard. That neighbor encouraged them to come over and taught the kids how to play football. Lorincz had her landlord put a “no trespassing” sign on her lawn to divide the area between her property and the neighbor’s yard. 

Neighbors claimed Lorincz would scream profanities at their children and were disturbed to learn that she was recording them. 

The children told the police that they were only playing hide and seek in the lot and that Lorincz would harass them, calling them slurs and swinging an umbrella or a gun at them.

One time, the kids said she even threw roller skates at them, though Lorincz says she was returning a pair of skates left on her lawn. They say Lorincz accused them of trying to steal her truck. “We’re 11!” one of the children is heard saying in the doc. They nicknamed Lorincz a “Karen,” slang for angry middle-aged white women who can be racist in their complaints. 

From phone calls to a tragedy

The film centers around an incident on June 2, 2023, when Lorincz claimed that boys were trespassing on her property, and when she told them to go away, they said they were going to get their mom. Lorincz called police, and a dispatcher said officers would be there shortly. 

Then Lorincz claims she was inside her home when Ajike Owens, a McDonald’s manager who lived in her neighborhood, showed up and started banging on her door. So she took a gun and shot through the door, not realizing Owens’ son was standing right next to her. “I thought she was going to kill me,” Lorincz told police, repeatedly insisting that it was not a purposeful, premeditated act. When police gave her an opportunity to write an apology letter after being questioned, she took them up on the offer, apologizing to the children and explaining that she “acted out of fear,” afraid their mom was going to kill her.

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws do permit deadly force if there is a presumption of fear. Homicides involving white shooters and Black victims are more likely to be ruled justifiable than those involving Black shooters and white victims. Most famously, the law led to the 2013 acquittal of a white man named George Zimmerman, who shot unarmed Black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

However, in footage of police questioning Lorincz, detectives say they don’t understand why she took out a gun a mere two minutes after a 911 dispatcher said police were on their way to the scene. As one of them put it, “the decisions you make are not reasonable.” During the 2024 sentencing, the presiding judge argued that Lorincz acted more out of anger than fear. 

The doc features snippets of national TV coverage of the case. Lorincz and Rev. Al Sharpton even gave the eulogy at Owens’ funeral, commending her actions and speaking directly to her children: “If she allowed people to degrade you, you’d grow up with a feeling that you were something that could be degraded.”

The takeaway from The Perfect Neighbor

“If we don’t bear witness to crimes like this, if we turn away, if we don’t shine a light on them, they will continue in the dark,” director Geeta Gandbhir tells TIME.

By scouring two years of police body cam footage, Gandbhir hoped to turn a tool intended to protect police into a tool that exposes their faults.

Gandbhir, whose family was close to Owens, wonders why the police didn’t bring in a social worker or other type of mediator to diffuse the situation. 

And she thinks that police should have taken action against Lorincz earlier, based on the weapons in her house and the numerous calls to emergency services for non-emergencies.

“The police don’t have to come in guns blazing and beating people to still have failed the community,” she argues. “If you can pick up a gun to solve a trivial dispute with your neighbor, what else are you capable of?”