A US woman who laughed as she filmed her boyfriend suffocating to death was ‘justified in her actions’, a jury was told.
Sarah Boone appeared at 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 claims the two of them were playing a drunken game of ‘hide and seek’ when Mr 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 yesterday, broadcast live on talktv.com, 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 in his opening statement 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.
Mr 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 Mr Torres became a ‘captive audience’ in the suitcase, Mr 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 Mr 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 Mr Torres dead and asked him to come over.
Mr 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 phoned 911, 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.
Jurors were also shown police bodycam footage filmed outside the apartment following the 911 call.
The video shows Boone telling deputy Kayla Rodriguez what allegedly happened.
She says they’d drunk a bottle of wine and were playing ‘hide and seek’, when he got in the suitcase.
Appearing calm at first, Boone starts getting agitated, repeating that she fell asleep.
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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