How A Florida Mom Was Gunned Down By Her Neighbor – The Devastating Story Behind Netflix’s Newest Documentary ‘The Perfect Neighbor’

Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor is blunt in its ugliness. This is a movie about how a years-long feud between neighbors ended in the former shooting and killing of the latter in front of their children, all because of a long, unchecked history of harassment that was ignored over and over again until it finally exploded in a burst of deadly violence. The 97-minute documentary, directed by Geeta Gandbhir, tells the entire story in raw police bodycam footage, 911 calls, and interrogation videos, so it’s as clear and unsparing in its presentation of the facts as it is about what happened one day in Ocala, Florida between a 60-year-old woman named Susan Lorincz and her neighbor, 35-year-old Ajike “AJ” Owens.

Beginning years before the killing, Lorincz, who is white, can be seen on dozens of bodycam videos, repeatedly calling the cops on kids – many of whom are Black – who play in a vacant lot near her house. “They’re trespassing,” she says. “They’re trying to steal from me.” “They’re threatening me,” she says. “They were trying to peer into my house,” she says. The cops arrive, see no crime, and leave. The neighbors tell the cops that Lorincz curses at the kids and yells racial slurs at them, and she films them with her phone. The children tell the police she swings umbrellas at them and brandishes a gun. One says she once threw a pair of roller skates at them. The footage goes on, as do the calls, as the neighbors get increasingly frustrated but nothing changes.

June 2, 2023 was the culmination of it all. That day, Owens’ children were playing in the street when one of them accidentally left a tablet in Lorincz’s yard. When they returned to get it, Lorincz called them thieves and began yelling at them. She threw a roller skate at them, per an affidavit, and began swinging an umbrella when one of Owens’ sons stepped in to say something to her. The kids were scared and mad, so they went inside and told their mom. Owens had had enough of Lorincz’s years of harassment and anger and, with her nine-year-old son next to her, approached Lorincz’s house to confront her. Lorincz had already called 911, so she was on the phone with dispatchers, who were told that Owens was at her door, “yelling and banging.” Minutes later, she went inside, got her gun, looked through the locked front door, and fired one shot, which hit Owens in the chest. Her son yelled, “She shot my mom!” as neighbors ran out to try and help. They managed to get Owens to the hospital, but she died from the wound. Two of her children were with her at the time of the shooting.

Bodycam footage from the aftermath is grisly. Officers arrive on the scene to find Owens dying, her children crying, and neighbors on their porches in shock. An officer can be seen lifting Owens’ body off the porch, and another officer calls 911 to report they have “shots fired.” Police question Lorincz, who says she was acting in self-defense. Detectives confront her with her statements and, based on the bodycam video, show that her fear was irrational, as she was inside her own home with a locked front door. “The decisions you made were not reasonable,” one detective says.

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law made it so Lorincz was able to claim self-defense in court, but prosecutors argued that she acted out of anger and frustration, not fear. In August 2024, a jury found Lorincz guilty of manslaughter with a firearm and sentenced her to 25 years in prison. In his sentencing, Judge Robert Hodges called the shooting “completely unnecessary” and told Lorincz he believed that when she called 911 to say she felt threatened, “you were fully aware that the police were on their way.”

The film doesn’t have narration or talking-head commentary – it just shows what happened. This makes it incredibly difficult to watch, but it also makes it impossible to argue that Lorincz didn’t have the neighbors on speed dial to call 911 all the time, that she didn’t use racial slurs against her Black neighbors with impunity, and that something didn’t have to give before the shooting. We see Pamela Dias, Owens’ mother, briefly in the aftermath, but she mostly appears in one interview. In the years since, she’s worked to institute gun reform and racial justice through her nonprofit, the Standing in the Gap Fund. “Justice would be this never happening in the first place,” she said after the verdict.

Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor is one of the most powerful docs on the service because it doesn’t skirt the issue or beat around the bush with talking heads or reconstructions ~ it just shows everything in graphic detail. It’s a damning, brutal account of how a seemingly innocuous neighbor became a murderer because everyone ignored every single warning sign for too long, until a mother was dead in front of her children. It’s infuriating and raw, and it should make everyone watching it demand accountability and action on every single level.