{"id":35435,"date":"2024-12-03T03:20:06","date_gmt":"2024-12-03T09:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=35435"},"modified":"2024-12-03T03:20:26","modified_gmt":"2024-12-03T09:20:26","slug":"florida-woman-who-zipped-boyfriend-into-suitcase-sentenced-to-life-in-his-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=35435","title":{"rendered":"Florida woman who zipped boyfriend into suitcase sentenced to life in his murder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Florida woman was sentenced Monday to life in prison for zipping her boyfriend into a suitcase and leaving him to die\u2002<\/a>of suffocation amid a history of domestic and alcohol abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Circuit Judge Michael Kraynick imposed the sentence in Orlando on Sarah Boone, 47, for the 2020 killing of 42-year-old Jorge Torres<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A jury deliberated only 90 minutes Oct. 25 before convicting Boone<\/a> of the second-degree murder of Jorge Torres after a 10-day trial. Boone had insisted she was herself a victim of domestic violence at the hands of Torres and had rejected a plea deal offer of a 15-year sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Torres\u2019 family members testified at the hearing that his death has torn them apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSarah deserves to rot in jail,\u201d said a sister, Victoria Torres. \u201cSarah has caused a lifetime of pain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her own statement, Boone went through a litany of abuse by Torres she said occurred over many years, decried the way her trial was handled and covered by the media, yet asked forgiveness for her actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI forgive myself for falling in love with a monster. I tried breaking the spell … I never stopped loving him,\u201d said Boone, who has been in jail for 58 months. \u201cI didn\u2019t mean for this to happen. Forgive me Jorge. Forgive me Torres family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, Boone told Orange County Sheriff\u2019s Office investigators that she and Torres had been drinking heavily and playing hide-and-seek on Feb. 23, 2020, in their Winter Park, Florida, residence when they thought it would be amusing for the 103-pound Torres to climb into the suitcase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They had been drinking and she decided to go to sleep, figuring that Torres could get out of the suitcase on his own, she told detectives in an arrest report.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she woke up the next morning, she didn\u2019t find Torres but then remembered he was in the suitcase. She unzipped the suitcase and found him unresponsive, the arrest report said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boone was charged with second-degree murder after investigators found videos on her cellphone in which Torres is heard yelling from inside the suitcase<\/a> that he couldn\u2019t breathe and repeatedly calling out Boone\u2019s name, according to the arrest report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe decided to keep (Torres) in the suitcase when he said he could not breathe in it to terrorize him,\u201d prosecutor William Jay said in a court filing. \u201cShe then struck him with a baseball bat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boone rejected a plea offer from prosecutors that would have imposed a 15-year prison sentence in exchange for her guilty plea to a reduced manslaughter charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During her trial, Boone testified that past violent incidents between her and Torres caused her to perceive a threat of imminent harm and that she acted in self-defense by keeping him in the suitcase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah that\u2019s what you do when you choke me,\u201d Boone said in one of the cellphone videos from that night, according to the arrest report. \u201cOh, that\u2019s what I feel like when you cheat on me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Florida woman was sentenced Monday to life in prison for zipping her boyfriend into a suitcase and leaving him to die\u2002of suffocation amid a history of domestic and alcohol abuse. Circuit Judge Michael Kraynick imposed the sentence in Orlando on Sarah Boone, 47, for the 2020 killing of 42-year-old Jorge Torres. A jury deliberated only 90 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":35436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1152],"tags":[31435,1437,22874,1584,1398],"class_list":["post-35435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanrights","tag-boyfriend","tag-florida","tag-life-sentence","tag-murder","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35437,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35435\/revisions\/35437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}