What the phone had recorded
Detectives took that phone. Digital forensics investigators went through it, and they found two videos from the night before, recorded about 11 minutes apart.
Both showed the blue suitcase, zipped shut, on the floor of the apartment. Jorge was inside it.
In the videos, he calls out her name, over and over. He tells her he can’t breathe and begs her to let him out. Deputies wrote in the arrest affidavit that you can see the sides of the suitcase move as he tries to get out.
Sarah is behind the camera. She is laughing.
“Sarah, I can’t breathe, babe,” he says.
“That’s on you,” she answers.
When he pleads again, she tells him, “Yeah, that’s what you do when you choke me.” At another point she says, “That’s what I feel like when you cheat on me.”
Nothing on those videos looked like a game, or like a joke both of them were in on. And she had not forgotten he was in there. She had stood over the suitcase and filmed him begging.
Then she went upstairs to bed.
Charged with murder
The medical examiner’s findings did not fit her story either. The autopsy found bruises and scratches on Jorge’s body, including injuries to his head and face, and a cut lip.
Two days after the 911 call, on February 26, 2020, Sarah Boone was in the Orange County Jail, charged with second-degree murder and held without bond.
Four years and nine lawyers
Her case would not reach a jury for more than four and a half years.
Along the way, Sarah went through lawyer after lawyer. Attorneys asked to be taken off the case, and the trial date kept moving. By the time it finally started, she was on her ninth defense attorney. When that lawyer asked for yet another delay, Circuit Judge Michael Kraynick refused and said she “only has herself to blame.”
Before trial, prosecutors offered her a deal: plead guilty to manslaughter and serve 15 years. She turned it down.
Her story had changed too. It was no longer an accident. Sarah now said that Jorge had abused her for years and that she had kept him in the suitcase in self-defense. The relationship really had been troubled. Court records described a history of domestic violence and heavy drinking between the two, and the jury would later see police body camera footage from earlier incidents between them.
The trial
The trial opened at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando on October 18, 2024.
One of the first witnesses was Deputy Kayla Rodriguez, who had answered the 911 call. Jurors watched her body camera footage from that afternoon: Sarah in the parking lot, telling the story of the bottle of wine, the game and the suitcase.
Then they watched the videos from her phone.
Prosecutor William Jay told the jury that she had acted “with the malicious intent to punish him.” Her lawyer, James Owens, argued that the whole case came down to what happened in the 11 minutes between the two recordings. “She loved her man,” he said. “She hated the abuse.”
Sarah took the stand and testified for about five hours. She said she had never meant to kill Jorge, that she was terrified of him, and that she believed he could get himself out.
So why didn’t she unzip the suitcase when he said he couldn’t breathe? She said she “wanted him to try to understand how I felt.”
On October 25, 2024, after a 10-day trial, the jury went out to deliberate. They were back in about 90 minutes. Guilty of second-degree murder.
Her lawyer said she was in shock. She had thought she had a defense.
“It happened and I’m sorry”
Sarah Boone was sentenced on December 2, 2024.
Jorge’s family spoke first. “She not only killed my son, she killed a father, a brother, an uncle,” his mother, Blanca Torres, told the court. “Sometimes when I look out the window, I’m waiting for him to come and say, ‘Mom, I love you.'”
His sister, Victoria, said Sarah “has caused a lifetime of pain.” His daughter, Ana Victoria, said that in the first year after her father died she often woke up screaming.
Sarah spoke for a long time. She described the abuse she said Jorge had put her through and criticized how her trial had been run and covered. “It happened and I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgive myself for falling in love with a monster.”
“Forgive me, Jorge,” she said. “Forgive me, Torres family.”
Judge Kraynick sentenced her to life in prison.
She is now serving that sentence in a Florida state prison. Even her appeal has run through a string of court-appointed lawyers.
On the afternoon Jorge Torres was found, she told the deputies that the only problem was that she fell asleep. Her phone had recorded what she did before she went to bed.
