by A Florida woman was sentenced to life in prison Monday for zipping her boyfriend into a suitcase and leaving him to die of 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 murder of 42-year-old Jorge Torres.
A jury deliberated just 90 minutes on Oct. 25 before convicting Boone of the second-degree murder of Jorge Torres after a 10-day trial. Boone had maintained that she herself was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of Torres and had rejected a 15-year settlement offer.
Torres’ family members told the hearing that his death tore them apart.
“Sarah deserves to rot in jail,” said a sister, Victoria Torres. “Sarah has caused a lifetime of pain.”
In her own statement, Boone endured a litany of abuse at the hands of Torres that she said occurred over many years, denounced the way her trial was handled and reported in the media, but still asked for forgiveness for her actions.
“I forgive myself for falling in love with a monster. I tried to break the spell…I never stopped loving him,” said Boone, who has been in prison for 58 months. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen. Forgive me Jorge. Please forgive the Torres family.”
Initially, Boone told Orange County Sheriff’s Office investigators that she and Torres had been drinking heavily and playing hide-and-seek at their Winter Park, Florida, residence on February 23, 2020, thinking it would be fun for the 103-pound Torres to climb into the suitcase.
They had been drinking and she decided to go to sleep, thinking Torres could get out of the suitcase himself, she told detectives in an arrest report.
When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t find Torres, but then remembered he was in the suitcase. She unzipped the suitcase and found him unresponsive, the arrest report said.
Boone was charged with manslaughter after investigators found videos on her cellphone in which Torres was heard screaming from the suitcase that he couldn’t breathe and repeatedly calling Boone’s name, according to the arrest report.
“She decided to keep Torres in the suitcase when he said he couldn’t breathe in it to terrorize him,” prosecutor William Jay said in a court filing. “She then hit him with a baseball bat.”
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.
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.
“Yes, that’s what you do when you choke me,” Boone said in one of the cellphone videos from that night, according to the arrest report. “Oh, that’s how I feel when you cheat on me.”
