On the night of February 23, 2020, Jorge Torres Jr. was zipped inside a blue suitcase in a Winter Park, Florida apartment. He weighed a hundred and three pounds. He could not breathe. His girlfriend recorded his pleas on her phone and laughed. By the following afternoon she had called 911 and he was dead. It would take nearly five years for the case to reach a jury. The jury needed less than two hours to convict her.

Winter Park, Florida

Jorge Torres Jr. was forty-two years old in February 2020, living with his girlfriend Sarah Boone in an apartment in Winter Park, a suburb of Orlando. The relationship was, by the account of investigators and court records, one defined by mutual volatility. Torres had been arrested several times on domestic violence allegations involving Boone. She had been arrested once on a battery by strangulation charge against him a charge that was later dismissed. Each time Torres was jailed, Boone bailed him out.

They were, in the language the defense would eventually use at trial, codependent. Whether that word can carry the weight the defense tried to place on it is a question the jury ultimately answered.

The Night of February 23

Boone told investigators what had happened. She said they shared a bottle of wine and played hide-and-seek. She said putting Torres in the suitcase had started as a joke. She zipped it shut, she said, and went upstairs and fell asleep, and when she came back he was dead. What she said later, under further questioning, complicated that account considerably: she admitted she had also struck him with a baseball bat while he was inside the suitcase.

The medical examiner determined that Jorge Torres Jr. died of suffocation. His death was ruled a homicide.

The Phone

When investigators arrived at the apartment, Boone voluntarily handed them her phone. It contained two videos recorded the previous night. In them, Torres can be heard from inside the zipped suitcase, pleading with her, telling her he cannot breathe. Boone is audible in the recordings, and she is laughing.

She told him: That’s what you do when you choke me.

She told him: That’s what I feel like when you choke me. That’s what I feel like when you cheat on me.

Later, when investigators asked her about the videos, she told them she did not remember recording them.

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Five Years

The case against Sarah Boone was not resolved quickly. Eight attorneys withdrew from representing her over the course of four years seven of them court-appointed. The cascade of withdrawals was so unusual that Judge Michael Kraynick eventually ruled she had forfeited her right to appointed counsel, and she represented herself during portions of the proceedings. The trial was delayed first by the COVID-19 pandemic and then again when Hurricane Milton struck Florida in October 2024.

In 2024, after finding a new attorney through a handwritten flyer that drew media attention one of the stranger chapters in an already strange case the prosecution offered her a plea deal. She could plead to manslaughter and receive a fifteen-year sentence. She rejected it.

The Trial

The trial began in October 2024. Boone was forty-seven years old. She was charged with second-degree murder. The prosecution argued she had acted with malicious intent to punish Torres that the suitcase was not a prank gone wrong but an act of deliberate cruelty, the videos proof of the state of mind she had brought to the room that night. Torres had weighed a hundred and three pounds when he died. He had been zipped shut inside a suitcase. He had called for help and been mocked and left.

The defense had, at earlier stages of the proceedings, maintained the death was an accident. By the time the trial opened, that position had shifted. Defense attorney James Owens argued that Boone suffered from battered woman syndrome that the relationship had been genuinely abusive, that Torres had hurt her, and that his death had been, in some sense, the only exit she had been able to find. He acknowledged the couple had loved each other. He argued the jury should understand what that love had looked like from inside it. The jury deliberated for under two hours.

They found Sarah Boone guilty of second-degree murder.

The Sentence

On December 2, 2024, Sarah Boone was sentenced to life in prison. Her attorney said she was shocked by the verdict. The word shocked does a particular kind of work in cases like this it marks the distance between what the person on trial believed their case had established and what twelve people decided after hearing it. She had rejected a fifteen-year manslaughter plea. She received life.

She has since obtained a new attorney and is appealing her conviction.

Winter Park, Florida

Jorge Torres Jr.’s brother Juan testified at trial that the two brothers had spoken weekly. That they had lived five to ten minutes from each other. That he had spoken to Jorge briefly before the night he died and had heard Boone yelling in the background about what, he could not fully make out.

He was forty-two years old. He weighed a hundred and three pounds the night he died inside a blue suitcase in an apartment in Winter Park. He told her he could not breathe, and she told him it was his fault, and she recorded it, and she went upstairs to sleep.

The jury watched the videos. They took less than two hours. Jorge Torres Jr. was forty-two years old when he died on February 24, 2020, in Winter Park, Florida. The Orange County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by suffocation. Sarah Boone was convicted of second-degree murder on October 25, 2024, and sentenced to life in prison on December 2, 2024. She is appealing her conviction.