How a ‘revolutionary’ CCTV film depicts a horrific killing in the US

Director Geeta Gandbher’s reconstruction of the events contains no narration, nor does it rely on witness interviews, but instead on a doorbell camera, which captures the sound of gunfire, and Owens’ son’s screams to call 911. Police cameras track paramedics trying to help Owens after she is shot. Subsequent cameras watch relentlessly as the children’s father tells them their mother “isn’t coming back.” Cameras inside the police car show Susan Lorinsch, who is not under arrest, sitting in the back, while a neighbor shouts: “Why did you do that?”

Gandpierre told the BBC that the footage first came to her because she was a friend of the Owens family. Lawyers representing the Owens family had requested materials from police, and the family wanted to know if there was anything to keep the case in the news. “There was approximately thirty hours of video about the case, including doorbell camera, body camera, cell phone footage, police interviews with people in the community, as well as audio recordings of Susan’s conversations with the police, when she called them many times, many times,” Gandbeer says. “It was a mess, but we got through it, and that’s when I realized it could be a movie.”

The footage shows that the first time police officers were called to Lorench’s address due to a dispute with Ajike Owens was in February 2022, when Lorench claims Owens threw a “No Trespassing” sign that belonged to Lorench at her and hit her in the leg (Owens said she threw it to the ground and was not targeting her neighbor). No one was arrested.

The police were called several times over the next year, with Lorinsch making emergency calls complaining that local children, including Owen’s children, were torturing her. “I’m a single woman, I work from home, I’m peaceful, I’m the perfect neighbor,” Laurench says in another call to police, when she complained about neighborhood kids playing soccer on the grass near her house.