Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 1:01 in the afternoon on February 24, 2020, a woman called 911 from an apartment complex near Winter Park, Florida.
“My boyfriend is dead,” she told the dispatcher.
Her name was Sarah Boone. She was 42. She said she and her boyfriend had been playing the night before, that she had put him in a suitcase, and that it was “a hide-and-seek kinda thing.” Then she had passed out. When she woke up, he wasn’t breathing.
“He’s purple,” she said.
Her boyfriend was Jorge Torres Jr., also 42. The two had been together for about three and a half years.
“The problem is, I fell asleep”
Orange County Sheriff’s deputies were there within minutes, and their body cameras were recording.
Sarah stood outside in the parking lot in a gray T-shirt and pink shorts. Paramedics had already been inside. One deputy told her she could not go back into the apartment.
Then she told them what had happened, in her own words.
They had been having a nice night, she said. They were putting a puzzle together and doing some artwork. “We had a bottle of wine last night,” she said. “So then it’s like, we decided to play hide and seek.”
“So he gets in the suitcase.”
A deputy asked when she had last seen him alive. She answered with the line she would repeat again and again that afternoon.
“The problem is, is I fell asleep.”
She said she had zipped Jorge into the suitcase herself, gone upstairs and fallen asleep in her bed, “totally forgetting that he was in the suitcase still.”
She said she woke up but stayed in bed for a while. Around 12:30 that afternoon she finally came downstairs, couldn’t work out where Jorge was, and then remembered. She unzipped the suitcase, pulled him out and tried CPR.
Before she called 911, she said, she called her ex-husband, who lived just down the road, and he came straight over.
“Why is he purple?”
Asked again later, she told the same story, with one new detail.
“He thought it’d be funny to be put in the suitcase,” she said. “So I was like, okay. Well, I’m gonna joke with you and I’ll zip you up and make him, you know, squirm a little bit.”
“We both were laughing about it. And then I fell asleep.”
She told deputies that Jorge had no medical problems that she knew of and took no medication. “All we had was a bottle of wine,” she said. “Literally, just a bottle of wine.” Maybe he’d had a heart attack, she wondered, or an aneurysm. She didn’t know.
Later, she asked one of the investigators a question of her own.
“So just by looking at him, like, why is he purple?”
The suitcase
Investigators photographed the suitcase where it sat on the carpet downstairs: a big, soft-sided rolling case. Jorge Torres was a small man, about 103 pounds. To fit inside, he had to lie on his side with his knees pulled up.
Sarah told the detective who interviewed her that she had not left Jorge completely trapped. Two of his fingers, she said, had been sticking out of the zipper, so he would have been able to get himself out.
Later that afternoon, by the yellow tape, the conversation turned to where she would sleep that night, and then to her phone.
It was inside the apartment, she confirmed. Jorge didn’t even have one of his own, she said.
“He uses my phone.”
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