3.Opening Statement — Prosecution

MR. JAY: Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, what the evidence in this case is going to show you is that this defendant zipped Jorge -- Jorge Torres shut in a suitcase. She was able to do this because at the time of his death, he only weighed 103 pounds. And she did this with the malicious intent to punish him, and then she went up to sleep and left him to take his final breaths on this earth alone. How many breaths those were, we don't know. The evidence is going to show that it was at least for about 15 minutes because there's going to be two videos that the defendant herself took of this event. The evidence is going to show Jorge Torres is dead because, in this defendant's judgment, he deserved it. And out of a conscious disregard for whether he lived or died, you will see and hear these videos.

What I expect you will hear from a video that began at 11:12 p.m., 45 seconds, on February 23rd, 2020, in Orange County, Florida, is a suitcase on the ground facedown with the zippers facing the floor. You will hear, Sarah. The defendant will say, For everything you've done to me. Sarah. For everything you've done to me. Sarah. Fuck you, and then the defendant laughs. Sarah. Fuck you, and the defendant laughs. Sarah. Stupid. Sarah. That's my name, don't wear it out. Sarah, I can't fucking breathe, baby, seriously. Yeah, that's what you do when you choke me. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. The defendant laughs again. Sarah, I can't breathe, babe. She laughs again. That's on you. Sarah, I can't breathe. She laughs again. Unintelligible words, and I would submit the evidence is going to show because of the intoxication from alcohol is the next thing she says. Sarah, Sarah. Sarah, I can't breathe, baby. That's what I feel like when you cheat on me. Sarah. Fuck you. I can't fucking breathe, Sarah. You should probably shut the fuck up. Sarah. "Shh" is the last thing you will hear the defendant say to Mr. Torres as he is facedown, zipped shut in a suitcase. That, again, began at 11:12:45 and lasts just over two minutes.

At 11:23:03 p.m., there's a second 22-second video, and it's the defendant zooming in on the Suitcase. And all you hear during this 22 seconds, after he's been in the suitcase since at least 11:12 p.m., is one more time, Sarah.

How did we get to this point where 103-pound Jorge Torres gets put into this suitcase, left to die? Well, the next morning, the defendant wakes up, late morning, perhaps early afternoon, somewhere in this time range, several hours later, and she goes downstairs and she doesn't see Jorge anywhere, Mr. Torres, and eventually realizes, Oh, my God, he's in the suitcase.

And the first thing she does after taking him out -- and I believe you will hear a description by the defendant saying, Took his little legs out. At some point, she makes that statement. And tries to resuscitate him. Hears gurgling as she presses down on his 103-pound chest, forcing whatever air was trapped in there out and gurgling. Then the next thing she does is, she doesn't call 911, she calls Brian Boone. Now, who's Brian Boone? Well, Brian Boone is her ex-husband. They share a child in common.

And this date, February 24th, 2020, is a Monday. A normal workday for most people. School day for their child that they share in common. But after they got divorced, the arrangement was, every other weekend they will coparent, and that weekend included Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so it's that three schedule. And then Mondays and Tuesdays, their child would be her responsibility and Wednesdays and Thursdays their child would be Mr. Brian Boone's responsibility. So February 23rd, 2020, was a Sunday, and now we have led into Monday, February 24th, 2020.

Mr. Boone had been trying, actually, to contact the defendant several times that morning because he just wanted to confirm she was going to get their child after school ended that day, and there had been a history of reliability issues on that -- on that issue on her part. So you will see in the phone record, he calls her and calls her and calls her. And then she finally calls him back instead of calling 911. And being the nice coparent that he is, he comes over. It's a short drive, five, ten minutes. And as she's explaining to him what the heck is going on, he peeks in through the front door of her townhouse, which allows you a view all the way to the back sliding glass door. You're going to see that her kitchen is off to the right, but there's a doorway that you can see all the way through. And then on the backside of the kitchen and the breakfast bar window area, there's tables and stuff, but there's also some blue legs sticking out in view. Brian Boone says, "Check, please, you need to call 911," and he doesn't set foot into that townhouse. He does wait outside, though, being the good coparent that he has been.

So, now, after having first called her ex-husband, after having first waited for Brian Boone to come over, the defendant makes the 911 call.

What you will not hear are tears. What you will not hear is sorrow. You will hear a certain level of concern. "My boyfriend and I were playing last night. Put him in a suitcase and we were playing hide-and-seek kind of thing. I fell asleep, found him dead in the Suitcase this morning. I don't know what happened. He had blood coming out of his mouth. Don't know if it was an aneurysm. Pulled him out of the suitcase, tried to give him CPR. He was in the suitcase and I fell asleep. He's not awake. He's purple. He's not breathing."

There's some instructions about how to do CPR given to her, asking about whether an AED is available to shock his heart. It's too late. He's cold. He's stiff. He's purple.

"We were playing hide-and-seek. We were playing hide-and-seek. This is horrible. This is horrific. What happened? Like, what happened? We were playing hide-and-seek last night and I fell asleep."

So she mentions that there was blood coming out of his mouth. And his body, like all bodies in suspicious deaths, was taken to the Ninth District Medical Examiner's Office and autopsied. And what the doctor found was what you would expect after being left ina Suitcase crumpled up in the fetal position, he passed from positional asphyxiation -- meaning, like, you're not going to get full breaths when you're crumpled up like an accordion -- and environmental suffocation. You don't have to have a plastic bag over your head taped shut with a full roll of duct tape to seal it off 100 percent and be worthy of the vacuum of space to environmentally suffocate. It's close enough if you can't get the oxygen and the CO2 coming in and out of your environment.

But she also did notice, yeah, he suffered from blunt force trauma on his torso and his face, his mouth. She'll use words like contusion. We'll help her explain contusions mean bruises. She'll use words like hematomas. We'll help her understand for you-all that that means bleeding under the skin and blood, what you, you know, expect from a bruise. That's why they're red and blue. But he had all this additional trauma. He had trauma on his fingers as well.

So now the sheriff's office, Orange County Fire Rescue show up and the defendant interacts with the first patrol officer. You will see and hear that body-worn camera, and it's more of the same of what we heard on the 911 call. "Dude, we were playing hide-and-seek. Everything was good. I just -- I fell asleep. I don't know what happened."

A few hours later, the detectives from the homicide unit at the Orange County Sheriff's Office approach her and are ready to interview her after doing some initial things, which includes grabbing her cell phone off of the counter that was found by the suitcase and by Mr. Torres and giving it to one of their digital forensic examiners, who we'll hear from later in the trial, Junella Uadan. But it's time to give a first interview with the defendant and so they do a first interview with the defendant in one of their unmarked detective patrol cars there on the scene.

And the basics of this remain the same, but there's a little more elaboration, as you would expect, from trained detectives versus getting the 911 call taken, but the basics of what the defendant tells them is: "We had wine, we painted, we drew, we did puzzles. The particular wine we had was a Chardonnay from the Woodbridge Winery. The bottles -- plural -- are in the trash. We started about 4 p.m. after Mr. Torres went to the store. Puzzles, art, listening to music, enjoying each other's company. We were just -- literally, just enjoying one another's company. The other bottle of wine that was left over from before wasn't even half full."

So the description she's saying is one bottle of wine and plus a fraction of a bottle of wine left over from the night before. Ladies and gentlemen, not all bottles of wine are made the same. Many of us may envision what you would expect at a restaurant. Those are 750s, 750 milliliters. Probably about that diameter (indicating). Bottles of wine that were recovered from the defendant's trash can were 1.5 liters, so the equivalent of two standard bottles of wine. A 1.5 liter bottle of wine is 50 ounces. Given that a standard serving of wine is 5 ounces, you can begin to do the math.

And there's receipts. The day before, Saturday, February 22nd, 2020, there is a receipt from Publix for a bottle of Woodbridge wine for $9.74. And then Sunday at 12:17 p.m., there is another receipt for $9.74 for a Woodbridge Chardonnay bottle of wine. And then at about 5:30 in the afternoon on February 23rd, again, there is another receipt for the same bottle of wine for the same price. And those two bottles of wine were recovered. They're going to be produced to you in evidence and you will see that they are, in fact, magnum bottles of wine.

So that's the context that we're dealing with when we hear things like, We only had one bottle of wine and we finished what was left in the bottle of wine from before. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there's two 1.5 liters that apparently were consumed by a 103-pound man and the defendant, who is in the same weight class. Plus, if you believe that the defendant and the decedent would leave leftover wine from any given day, any additional wine that was remaining from the 1.5 liters from Saturday. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a lot of wine.

So in that context: "We were just having wine, enjoying each other's company. At one point we played hide-and-seek." She says she didn't zip it up all the way. There was enough room -- in her words again, "There was enough room for his little fingers to get out. We were still having a good time and whatever." And, basically, you know, Mr. Torres is stressing out about jobs, his ex-wife, about money, and so they're just doing puzzles and doing things to keep his mind off of it. Doing art, playing with the dogs, dancing with the dogs, playing hide-and-seek. "We were always trying to outdo each other where we could find each other the best."

When they started playing hide-and-seek, she went up to the shower and then got tired of hanging out in the shower and came down, and that's when she found him playing around in the suitcase. "We both thought it was funny. I'm gonna zip you up. Two little fingers could stick out." And she went upstairs thinking, he'll get out, we're going to have sex and go to sleep and call it a day. It was a good day. She insists that they had wine, but were not drunk. You will be able to assess that for yourselves when you hear the recording she made.

"No ill will between us last night. Last argument? Maybe last week. Don't really argue. We came home, drink, smoke, did art, listen to music, play with the dogs. We drink what we can afford. We used to be able to afford liquor, but now we can only afford wine."

And that's how that day ends with the police. She goes and sleeps and stays at her ex-husband's house the night of February 24th into the 25th. What they are doing -- and by "they," I mean the Orange County Sheriff's Office -- in part is going through her phone. That's when they discover the two videos that I just described for you. And there's other things in the phone, which I will discuss with you ina little bit, but she's summoned in for another interview and she sits down and gives another interview on February 25th, now Tuesday.

She does describe past instances of violence. You're going to hear about that. She's going to say Mr. Torres had hit her with a curtain rod about a month ago. "Since then, though, like, we've been good. I've been good." She describes that he comes at him -- comes at her all the time. "He comes at me, so it's either I flee or I try to go upstairs and go to sleep. That's usually what it is. I don't know if you talk to Brian -- her husband -- about any of that, but most of the time I flee and I go over there." There's a discussion about why she stays with him, and you'll hear that for yourself. She will say that she doesn't really want to drink, she just takes an occasional drink. She drinks to placate him, Mr. Torres. She says that you're going to see phone videos of Mr. Torres smashing her TV in the past, like, a month earlier. You may see that too. But she doesn't get drunk. When she drinks, she likes being non compos mentis -- her words, not mine -- having her wits about herself.

Then she gets to the hide-and-seek again and describes that they've played it three times before, but had never zipped one another shut in it before. And they were really just running out of places to hide because it's just a townhome. She does not remember -- according to her, she does not remember taking any photos or videos of the night's events.

At this point they ask her, Look, would you like to see it? And she says, "I can't watch this. I flipped him over -- I flipped him over and that's where it was. Guys, this is killing me right now. That's why I flipped it over between the two videos. I didn't do anything intentional."

Discussion over whether he had two -- enough room to get any of his fingers out from the zipper. "My intention was not to leave him there. We both got in there. Both of us were in there."

When she went upstairs, my plan was not to -- quote, "He'll be up here any minute. My plan wasn't to leave him in the suitcase."

"Well, why is all this going on?"

"Tt's the drinking. That's what it is, it's the drinking. I thought it was -- like, I thought he was okay. Guys, that's -- that's how we were with each other. Nobody understands our relationship. This whole suitcase thing never happened before," though she described it happened before. "I'll never drink alcohol again."

She insists that she has no injuries on her, and you don't have to take her word for it because they took photographs of her and there were no injuries on her. She insists over and over that there was no violence that day. "It's, like, okay. We're in a good place right now."

They ask her about saying "fuck you" to Mr. Torres. "Well, that's just being playful and having a good day. Everybody is having a good day. I didn't touch him, nor did he touch me." Her words.

What else is found on her phone? There's a conversation between Mr. Torres' brother -- and, again, nobody knows who's using these phones at the time text messages are sent in these records that you're going to see, but it's indicated that there's a communication between one of the decedent's brothers and the owner of the phone that was taken that belongs to Ms. Boone.

The text from the brother is: "Yo, my daughter told me what you did, Sarah. I don't want you around any of my daughters or nieces and nephews." And that's Christmas 2019, just under two months before this event.

She replies, or the person using her device at this time, "Ugh, your, quote-unquote, dad hit me in the face."

The next text is, "Hide-and-seek, I shall."

On January 13th, there's another heated discussion. She describes it on January 13th in a text to Moe, the brother again: "It's a Torres thing. Boo." Sends a picture. "Keep the fugly creep out too. It's still fugly. Lose."

The brother responds, "Please do something with yourself, Sarah. God bless you."

The defendant's response: "And bless you and all of you too. I'll get -- in all capitals -- rid of him. Then it'll be -- in all capitals -- better. Ugh, Torres." Referring to Mr. Torres, getting rid of.

And that's the case. That's what the evidence is going to show, but we, the State of Florida and the members of the jury, in our journey through this case, we're all going to come up to a door that says, Danger, keep out, stay away by court order, and that door says the defendant's history with the victim. It is a door we shall not enter without permission and invitation.

Halloween is in, like, 13 days. Part of the vampire lure is, you know, vampires can't come get you in your own house unless you invite them in. Well, I anticipate during this trial, we're going to be invited into the defendant's past relationship for the previous couple of years with Mr. Torres. And as we come inside this room, at her beckoning, we are going to have things pointed out that she would like us to focus on. And you're going to hear, the first night the defendant met the decedent, Mr. Torres, he smashes her phone, punches her. It's the first time in her life she had ever been punched, I expect is what the testimony will be. And he made her curl up ina fetal position on her own porch for four hours, and she was only able to escape this situation when he fell asleep.

I expect that you're going to hear that Mr. Torres is an alcoholic. I expect you may hear his high score on his blood alcohol level was a .342 once when he got treated at the hospital. This is a man who had serious alcohol problems, and I expect you're going to hear about that.

Despite that first date -- and this is going to tie into some other things that I expect could possibly come in. Despite that first date, despite at that point in time of this first date of not having a relationship, emotional ties, and the things that come along with a relationship that make it harder to break off a relationship -- it's one thing to have a bad first date, it's another thing to end a 25-year marriage is my point.

Despite that first date, there's a second and a third. Now, these dates are at bars, and there's nothing wrong with that, but -- and it just typically ends up -- she's going to tell you, I suspect, or you're going to hear that she said, one way or another, "It's one thing or the other. Like, I ask a dude fora cigarette, Mr. Torres flips out and I'm gonna pay the price." Just things like that.

And you're going to hear and potentially see, yes, there were injuries that the defendant is going to attribute to the victim causing her. Black eyes, cuts in the face, perhaps from the curtain rod incident that was mentioned in the police interview happening about a month before this, a bloody ear, a stab wound in the leg, which was, perhaps, described as sword fighting and playing around in medical records. But, nonetheless, I suspect you're going to hear and see a lot about their past history. And at the end, if this occurs, if this comes in, the State is going to have the opportunity to take lead of the tour in this room labeled the defendant and the victim's past history.

And I'm not going to go into that now. If this all comes to fruit, the fruit blooms on the tree during the trial, we'll discuss it at the end where it's more appropriate, but I'm asking you to not rush to judgment until you hear all of the evidence in the case and then apply whether or not these past instances have anything to do with what happened on February 23rd.

Now, like a home inspector, there are experts to come in and kind of help walk everybody through this room labeled the defendant and the victim's past relationship. I suspect -- there's a chance you may hear from some experts, psychologists and psychiatrists, about battered spouse syndrome. The State is not challenging in any way that battered spouse syndrome exists. It's well-recognized. The experts will tell you all about it. I'm not disputing that at all, but there's some things that we would hope that you pay attention to during all the testimony, if there is any, about this subject matter.

One is that it's not actually a recognized diagnosis in the Bible that they use in mental health called the DSM-5-TR, Diagnostic Statistical Manual, Version 5, and I think it's Text Revision, something like that, for the TR. What it is and what they describe it as is kind of a component of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, but because it's not actually in the book -- it's like a recipe book. It's like our statute books for lawyers. You go into this book, and say you have, you know, a particular disorder or diagnosis, it'll say, Well, all of us agree that it needs these three elements, like elements of a crime. Some of these elements have to be prevalent for a certain amount of time, so on and so forth. You imagine, it's a cookbook, it gives you the recipe for a diagnosis. But because there's no -- it's not in the cookbook, you may get some disagreement about what it means between the experts, because it's kind of like grandma's recipe handed down from generation to generation without being in writing. But what I expect you'll hear is, you know, it's important for people who don't have experience in certain abusive relationships that are violent to understand the control that can be exerted over an intimate partner by the other one; isolation, psychological violence, emotional violence, physical violence, sexual violence, which I suspect will be described for you as well by the defendant, perpetrated on her by the decedent.

You will hear about all this. And what it ties into at the end of the day -- we talked about this during jury selection -- is, if there is a self-defense instruction read to you, this is to help you understand what an objective and reasonable person in the circumstances would do. Because years ago -- we've gotten better as a society, but years ago when this was first being researched, the question would be, Well, why -- why wouldn't you leave? And battered spouse syndrome and the testimony from these experts help explain those things to people, Well, it's not that easy. You've got to look at what's going on in the relationship, the isolation, the control, so on and so forth, and that explains why you wouldn't leave.

Well, now -- but turning to the facts of our case, what you're going to decide the facts are is ordinary, objective, reasonable person in those circumstances taking those actions. If you get a self-defense instruction, it will be part of it. That's what it's used for. It's not used for explaining the subjective beliefs that one holds.

What you will also hear about these things is, just like any other doctor or any expert, like a home inspector, if a home inspector's report was based solely on the person who's trying to sell the house, what they say about the house, Oh, it's in great shape. I rewired the entire thing, brand new JVC pipes. This sucker is good to go. It's -- I'd appraise it at $600,000. You're not going to take that home inspector's report unless they lift the hood, kick the tires, do all the things that the fox on Carfax does. You want an expert to get reliable information, and an expert's opinion is only as good as the information that he or she relies on.

They will say, Yeah, you gotta -- you gotta -- you gotta take into account the credibility of the person who's giving you the story, even if it's the patient or the client that is saying all these things happened to him or her. You've got to find corroborative information. You've got to check reliability, particularly in circumstances that we will discuss at the end of the case.

So another thing that they're going to tell you is, just because there's a bunch of violent nonsense going on between two intimate partners doesn't mean that battered spouse syndrome applies. Some people can go home and fight like cats and dogs and that's just their day and they get over it and they live their life to fight another day. Their cycle just spins like that. So just because you hear about those things, what the expert is going to tell you is it doesn't mean that it necessarily applies.

If this testimony comes in, I expect that Dr. Harper will say that it applies to Ms. Boone, but we'll talk to her about what she relied upon to make that conclusion and we'll talk to her about some other things and take that journey together, if we get there.

But at the end of the day, after you hear all of the evidence in this case, particularly straight from the horse's mouth, the video, where you don't have to rely upon the credibility of anything other than your own two eyes and your own two ears, the State submits that you're going to return a guilty verdict for second degree murder. Because what the evidence is going to show is that the defendant killed Mr. Torres because she decided he deserved it, not because the evidence will show an objective reasonable person in her circumstances needed to.

Thank you.