On the racist cold-blooded murder of Ajike AJ Owens

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On Friday, June 2, at an apartment complex in Ocala, Florida, Ajike Owens, an unarmed black woman, was shot dead by a white neighbor. Once again an unarmed black person just trying to live his life has been shot by a white racist. And again, the initial response from law enforcement was to treat this as self-defense and allow the killer to remain free and armed.

It took four days of truth and protest from neighbors and family to break the media whitewash before the shooter was finally arrested for manslaughter with a firearm and other charges on Tuesday, June 6.

And all of America’s ugly history, from slavery to lynchings, from police killings to increasingly common vigilante killings, teaches us that arrest is no guarantee of accountability. The whole system is set up so that most of the time all a racist cop or vigilante has to do is pretend I was scared, and they’re likely to walk free as it turns out. is produced when George Zimmerman murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. And in 68% of successful vigilante cases, the person killed was unarmed.1

The murderer

Ajike AJ Owens, 35 and four young children, lived near Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman. Lorincz had been bullying neighborhood children for years for playing in a field near her home. She called them niggers,2 slaves and backwards, leaned on her car horn for minutes, even threatened them with violence. Phyllis Wills, a white woman with a black child, who lived across the street, called Lorincz a freak. Some parents would not let their children play outside for fear of her.3

Sheriff’s deputies have been called 12 times to the neighborhood since January 2021. Apparently most or all of those calls were from Lorincz, complaining that children were playing. He was repeatedly told that they were in a public space and had every right to be there. But it appears MPs never warned her to stop her racist harassment of children.

On Friday, Lorincz allegedly threw a pair of skates at one of the AJ kids, injuring his foot, tossing an umbrella and stealing an iPad. According to the family, Ajikes’ nine-year-old son told his mother what had happened. AJ did what any worried parent would do with her son, she knocked on Lorincz’s door and called her to come out and talk to them.4

Lorincz’s response was to shoot him through the closed door, into his chest. AJ collapsed. Her son shouted to neighbors that his mother had been shot. A neighbor ran to do CPR. AJ’s four children gathered together. But AJ later died in hospital, leaving her children motherless and traumatized.

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Marion County Sheriffs quickly arrived on the scene, responding to a trespassing call. Having found a dying black woman unarmed and a white woman armed with a gun she had just shot, did they disarm and take her into custody? NO! Instead, they treated his ridiculous claim of self-defense as a valid explanation and walked away without investigating and making an arrest.

Then they developed a narrative for the media (which has been widely repeated) that the shooting was the culmination of a long-running feud between the two women. In this story, aggression from both sides led to the shooting, and racism did not figure into the story at all.

The sheriff also argued that Floridas Stand Your Ground law meant he had to assume the shooting was self-defense and he couldn’t even make an arrest until the allegation of self-defense was made. not proven false.

Stand Your Ground laws in general really should be renamed legal lynching laws, or black people don’t have any rights that white people are bound to respect. Time and time again, they have been used to legally justify and acquit racist murderers. And for the cops, they’re just reinforcing the attitude they had before these laws came in, it’s just SOP, standard operating procedure.

But even Stand Your Ground may not be enough to whitewash this murder.5

People are talking

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