A Florida woman was found guilty on Friday of killing her boyfriend by hiding him in a suitcase while she was drunk and then forgetting about him and going to sleep. Eleven hours later, she found him dead.
In a press release, prosecutors said that Sarah Boone, 47, was found guilty of second-degree murder on Friday for the death of her boyfriend, Jorge Torres Jr. who was 42 years old.
“This is a horrible murder,” said Andrew Bain, the state attorney general. “No one should have to go through this kind of pain and fight for their lives, only to die alone in a suitcase begging for their last breath.” Today, justice was done when Sarah Boone was found guilty.
James Owens, Boone’s lawyer, said she was shocked by the outcome after arguing that she has “battered spouse syndrome.”
“She felt like, you know, she had a defense,” he told WESH [news source]. It’s clear that we’re very upset.
Boone had a lot of problems with her defense lawyers during her trial. Several of them quit or were fired. This week, Boone casually told the judge that she and her husband had been drinking for most of February 23, 2020, at their home in the 4700 block of Frantz Lane in Winter Park.
Torres wanted to play hide-and-seek and said, “Tag you’re it,” as Law&Crime had reported before.
Tores never came looking for Boone after he ran upstairs to hide in the shower. Boone said that as she went downstairs, she saw Torres open a big suitcase. She said it was a joke that she zip-locked him up.
We laughed about it, and she said, “It was just weird that he was small enough to fit in there.”
Boone said she moved the bag around the house.
She said, “At that time, it was funny.” “We were making fun of it and laughing about it.”
At that point, Boone chose to teach Torres a lesson. It was reported that Torres had abused Boone in the past, cutting her leg with a steak knife, hitting her, and slamming her head against a metal door, among other things. He meant to “take the time to talk to him.”
Boone said, “I can talk to him in a way I normally wouldn’t be able to.”
Tores was having trouble breathing at this point and begged her to let him out. She said no. A video of the event showed that she then started making fun of him and reminding him of the times he hit her. He told her he would “f–––ing end” her when he got out of the suitcase, but she says that wasn’t caught on video.
“It got really hot really fast,” she said.
Torres was able to take a hand out of the bag. Boone said she grabbed her son’s baseball bat in a “split-second” and hit the victim in the hand until he put it back inside.
She said she left him in the suitcase because she was afraid he would attack her if he got out. Boone said in court that she didn’t think he would die and that she thought he could get away on his own.
She fell asleep when she got upstairs. She woke up at 11 a.m. and went downstairs at 1 p.m. As she searched for Torres, she found the suitcase. Then she remembered that she had left him there.
She told the judge, “I don’t think I’ve ever been through anything like that before.” “I guess I was shocked.”
“I took the suitcase off right away, yelled, ‘Jorge! Jorge! Jorge!’ and shook him,” she said.
When Boone called her ex-husband, he told her to call 911. Torres was said to be dead.
As part of her battered spouse syndrome defense, her lawyer went over some of the times she had been abused in the past and showed the jury pictures of her injuries. When asked why she didn’t leave him, she said she hoped Torres would change and that they were “two bodies with one soul.”
She said, “I still love him.”
During cross-examination, the prosecutors used her previous report from a neighbor who said they heard a loud thud the night of the murder, which led them to believe she may have pushed Torres down the stairs while he was in the suitcase. William Jay, an assistant state attorney, also asked Boone why he thought he had to teach Torres a lesson while he was in the luggage.
She told Boone how she felt about his abuse because she thought it might make him a better person. He told her there was “no lesson to be learned.” Boone also showed the jury how she zipped up the suitcase and where Torres’ hands were when he tried to get out, as asked by Jay.
“Did you do anything to keep him from getting stuck after you zipped him up?” Jay asked.
“No,” Boone said.
If Boone is found guilty on Dec. 2, she could spend the rest of her life in prison.
This report was helped by David Harris and Alberto Luperon.