John Jefferson
Background: Sarah Boone (Law&Crime). Inset: Jorge Torres Jr. (Good Life Funeral Home).
Right down to the end, Sarah Boone — a convicted murderer — portrayed herself as the victim.
Not the man she left to die in a suitcase. Not his family members who were left heartbroken in the wake of his death.
While reading without emotion from a statement, the 47-year-old Boone unleashed a litany of grievances against the man she killed, her 42-year-old boyfriend Jorge Torres Jr., for his prior domestic abuse and his family for not intervening. She also blamed “scoundrel” detectives, prosecutors and the media for portraying her in a bad light.
But Florida Ninth Circuit Judge Michael Kraynick didn’t buy her sob story and sentenced her to life in prison on Monday. She had no reaction.
In the gallery, however, several of Torres’ family members shed tears and hugged.
A jury convicted Boone of second-degree murder in October of the February 2020 death of Torres.
Boone started out her statement by comparing herself to a piece of ceramic that becomes more beautiful when it cracks and is repaired. She went on to “forgive” Torres for every time he “slapped, raped, pulled, pushed, dragged and humiliated” her. Boone then forgave his family for “turning a blind eye” to the abuse.
As for the media who made her look so bad, she said there was blood “all over their hands and keyboards,” she said.
She then forgave herself for not escaping her abusive situation permanently. Boone labeled herself as a “survivor.”
“I forgive myself for falling in love with a monster,” she said.
Torres and Boone were drinking for much of Feb. 23, 2020, at their home in the 4700 block of Frantz Lane in Winter Park, a suburb of Orlando. At the end of the night, Torres wanted to play a game of hide-and-seek. He ended up getting himself into a suitcase and she zipped it up. But he couldn’t get out. Jurors at trial saw the videos she recorded on her phone of Boone taunting Torres as he begged for her to let him out.
“I can’t f—ing breathe, seriously,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s what you do when you choke me,” Boone said, and claimed that he’d cheated on her. The defendant told him he should “probably shut the f— up.”
She went to bed and woke up to find Torres dead inside the suitcase the next morning.
Boone’s defense claimed she was suffering from battered spouse syndrome and feared he would attack her if she unzipped the suitcase. But prosecutors argued she was never in danger at any point.
More coverage from Law&Crime: ‘Last breath inside a suitcase’: Florida woman zipped her boyfriend in a suitcase and killed him in game of ‘hide and seek’
At Monday’s sentencing hearing, Boone also apologized to Torres’ family and insisted she still loved him.
“Words do not describe my shame and I don’t know what else it is I can say and to convey to the Torres family how this happened. The ifs and whys and how’s really don’t matter. It happened and I’m sorry,” she said.
Prosecutors noted that Boone has never really taken responsibility for her actions. She’s not the victim, they said. The victim is Torres.
And she could have prevented his death.
“George Torres lived out his last nightmarish circumstance in that suitcase begging to be let out for several minutes,” the prosecutor said. “There was ample time and opportunity over and over for her to do something different.”
His family was left devastated. His sister Victoria Torres said Boone can “rot in hell.” Her brother’s death has left such an impact on her that she can’t even shut a suitcase all of the way because it reminds her of his death.
“Sarah has caused a lifetime of pain, a lifetime of horrible images, a lifetime of hearing my brother plead for his life,” she said.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Boone testified on her own behalf at trial.
Wearing a dark blazer and dark pants, she described without much emotion throughout her testimony how the two had been drinking for much of the day in question, talking on the back porch, putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle and completing art projects when Torres wanted to play a game of hide-and-seek by saying “tag you’re it.” Boone ran upstairs to hide in the shower, but Torres never came looking. As she walked downstairs, she saw Torres enter a large suitcase, Boone testified. She zipped him up as a joke, she said.
“We were laughing about it and it was just strange that he was small enough to fit in there,” she testified.
Boone said she rolled the suitcase around the home.
“At that time it was funny,” she said. “We were joking and laughing about it.”
But then Boone decided it was time to teach Torres a lesson. Torres had previously been abusive toward Boone, slashing her in the leg with a steak knife, slamming her head against a metal door and hitting her in several different incidents, she said. Boone wanted to “take the time to talk to him.”
“I have the ability to speak to him in a manner I ordinarily would not have the ability to do,” Boone said.
At this point, Torres began to struggle to breathe and started to beg her to let him out. She refused. Instead, she started mocking him and reminding him of the times he beat her up, video of the incident showed. Not on video, she claims, are Torres’ threats that he was going to “f—ing end” her when he got out of the suitcase.
“It got very heated very quickly,” she said.
Torres was able to get a hand out of the suitcase. Calling it a “split-second reaction,” Boone said she grabbed her son’s baseball bat and hit his hand until he put it back inside. She said she left him in the suitcase because she was “terrified” he would get out and attack her. Boone testified she didn’t think he would die and thought he would be able to get out on his own.
Once upstairs, she fell asleep. She awoke around 11 a.m. and went downstairs around 1 p.m. Looking around for Torres, she came across the suitcase. She remembered she left them in there.
“I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like that before,” she testified. “I guess I was aghast.”
Boone pulled Torres out. He was purple and gurgling, she testified.
“I immediately unzipped the suitcase and was like ‘Jorge! Jorge! Jorge!,’ and I was shaking him,” she said.
Boone called her ex-husband who told her to call 911. Torres was declared dead.
Her defense attorney walked her through some of the previous incidents of abuse, showing jurors photos of her injuries as part of her battered spouse syndrome defense. Asked why she didn’t leave him she said she hoped Torres would improve his behavior and that she and Torres were “two bodies with one soul.”
“I love him to this day,” she said.
During cross-examination, prosecutors pressed her previous testimony from a neighbor’s account that said they heard a loud thud the night of the murder, suggesting she may have pushed Torres down the stairs while he was in the suitcase. Assistant State Attorney William Jay also questioned why Boone felt the need to teach Torres a lesson while inside the luggage.
Boone responded there “was no lesson to be learned” but she wanted him to know how she felt about his abuse in hopes he’d become a better person. Jay also had Boone demonstrate to the jury how she zipped up the suitcase and showed Torres’ hand placement when he tried to get out.
“Did you do anything to help him escape from the predicament that you zipped him up in?” Jay asked.
Boone said “No.”
It was a long road to trial. Boone has gone through eight attorneys in this case. Some counsel bowed out while citing ethical considerations. For example, the public defender’s office had to punt because it had previously represented Torres in a domestic violence charge in which Boone was the victim. Nonetheless, others, like Frank J. Bankowitz, backed off because of friction with the defendant.
“No attorney can satisfy her,” he wrote when leaving the case last year.
Boone voiced disdain, respectively bad-mouthing both him and her final attorney, Patricia Cashman, as “unprofessional” and having a “snotty attitude.”
Alberto Luperon contributed to this report.
Read the full article here