For mamas like Ajike “AJ” Owens
CALL TO ACTION: JusticeForAJOwens.org
Sign the petition seeking an immediate investigation and arrest of AJ Owens’ killer.
Read our Statement on the murder here.
“Baby Stop!” I yelled as my husband was walking around the corner of the house in his plaid pajamas that he cut the arms off of, the matching shorts that had once been pants hanging below his knees. He was going to talk to our downstairs neighbor, whose front door was behind the building, he was fuming. After a couple weeks of dealing with antagonizing and taunting we were fed up, we even called the police department and property management to complain. Let me go back a little, but first I want to tell you about a black mama in Florida who was recently murdered by her white neighbor.
It took four days for an arrest because of Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, which grants immunity to someone who claims this defense from arrest, detainment, and prosecution. Susan Lorincz shot her neighbor, Ajika “AJ” Owens, through her front door when AJ approached to address the woman calling her kids racial slurs, and trying to retrieve the kids iPad that they had left in her yard when they were playing earlier. She shot and killed AJ THROUGH her front door. Like every other time I read of a black person’s unjust killing at the hands of a racist I began to cry as I read the news, but this time my tears were short lived. Between work meetings and brainstorming for upcoming projects I began processing my thoughts. Toward the end of the workday I emailed the most recent call to action I found online (call the Sheriff’s Department to demand her arrest; at this point she still hadn’t been arrested) to all the coalitions that I am a part of for work (I work for a reproductive rights organization). Myself and some of my peers began texting and messaging back and forth about what we could do about this. Now, let me explain to you why I was yelling “stop” to my husband that one afternoon.
Summer of 2021 we were looking for a 3 bedroom because we had outgrown the 2 bedroom we had lived in for the past four years. We have four kids total, three that live with us full time. The day we took the kids to see our new place, before our actual move-in date, we walked up the seven steps to the wooden front deck, and our kids sped in past us once we got the front door unlocked. They zoomed up and down the halls giggling and chatting in excitement amongst themselves. My husband and I walked around, room to room, talking about our moving plans. It was summer time so we had to juggle caring for the kids who were on summer break and moving, cleaning, etc. Seemingly out of the blue we heard a loud banging on the front door, like police were at the door. I got that feeling in my throat of pure fear. My husband is a tall dark skinned black man, so police being at the door…you can imagine or you might actually relate to that feeling I felt. We both were looking at each other like HUH?? I think we even said “who could that be?” to one another. He told me he would go check and I stood not too far behind in the kitchen and listened.
An older white man was standing there and when my husband opened the door and asked “could I help you” the man told him that he lived downstairs and it’s loud with our kids running around. My husband didn’t say anything to him, was just nodding and listening and let him leave when he was done venting. When we moved in the next week he began banging on the ceiling if our kids got “too loud”, during the day he would also sit outside his front door, which was directly under our bedroom and bathroom windows, and he would throw a tennis ball up against the wall right underneath our windows. He would continue to throw it, obnoxiously like he was looking to exact revenge on us for having children living in the unit above him.
When we called our property manager to complain about the antagonism they told us he would be leaving soon anyway as they were raising the rent and he couldn’t afford it, they also mentioned that the property owner planned to renovate and use the unit as a vacation home. [That should have clued us into the fact that they would do the same to us 11 short months later, but that’s a different story.] One day my husband yelled out the window asking him to stop throwing the ball up at our window. The man began to antagonize and yell back and forth with my husband. My husband yelled that he was coming down there and that’s when I’m sure I heard the man turn to his daughter, who lived in the unit next to his, and call my husband a ni**er.
So when my husband snatched open our front door, in his flip flops and pajamas on what should've been a quiet relaxing Sunday, and hit that corner that feeling creeped back up into my throat. I ran out onto the porch, barefoot, yelling “baby stop! Baby please!” I was so glad when he abruptly stopped in his tracks and turned back and stormed back into his house. I don’t know what got into him to just wrangle his anger together but I am so glad he did. I think that the same thoughts I had, he did too. You know when you can just look at someone and know what one another is thinking? That’s the look we gave one another when he came back up on the porch. All I could think was that old man was going to shoot my husband dead on his doorstep. I was so afraid for my husband, myself and our family.
It isn’t right but we have to be the ones to approach every situation like we’re dealing with a racist because more often than not, we are. We live in the United States, and more specifically in Florida, knowing that our human rights aren’t protected and as working class people we barely have the means to exercise our rights. On top of that we are black.
Understand that black people in 2023 still have to move with a consciousness of what is happening around us. We are not safe in our own neighborhoods, schools, grocery stores, homes, and doctors offices. You name the place. We aren’t safe there. We have the poorest health outcomes of all demographics. The right to exist does not exist for us.
Reproductive justice is defined as the right to parent, the right not to parent, and the right to parent children in a safe and healthy environment. It is the fusion of both the reproductive rights and social justice movements. This is what we are fighting for in the coalition space that is over a year old now, Black in Repro. We are a workgroup of a statewide coalition of dozens of groups, Floridians for Reproductive Freedom.
As a mom I cannot adequately explain the horror I feel every. single. time. I hear or read news about black people, especially youth, being killed or brutalized by law enforcement or racists. I think of my children and pray about their futures. I know that living in fear won’t change anything but it doesn’t soothe the fact that everyday this is happening to our people. Learning about this tragedy and it being a mother, who was literally doing what any mother and parent would do, defend her children, and was killed for it, doesn’t only trigger me but it enrages me and I know I have to take action to make a change. I am sharing the GoFundMe and petition links and making sure to stay updated on the latest information and inform my colleagues, coalition partners, and using my social media platforms to inform people in general. This story cannot die down because not only do we need justice for AJ but we need to keep working to ensure this doesn’t continue to happen to black people, parents and children in Florida and across the U.S.
When Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012 I was a student at FAMU and had my first call to action. A classmate was the first to tell us about the unjust killing and this was before George Zimmerman was even arrested. She urged us to call the Sanford Police Department and demand the arrest of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. I remember saving the number on a note in my phone. The next morning on my walk to work I remembered the call to action, pulled out my phone and called. I simply said my name and that I demand the arrest of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. When I hung up I felt so powerful, and immediately started looking into what next steps I could take. I became a student activist and community organizer and helped to found the FAMU Chapter of the Dream Defenders.
I read state law for the first time during our 30 day sit-in at the Florida Capitol and I quickly fell in love with the lawmaking process. Highlighting, underlining and writing questions in the margins of laws was something I got a sense of joy and accomplishment from. I knew that not only did I belong in the Capitol, but my voice and my experiences were needed to help create better laws to change the lives of the most vulnerable people who weren’t being represented in the lawmaking process. We were pushing for a package of bills that included a repeal of the Stand Your Ground, and the immunity that law gave to people who claimed it in their defense. The package of bills was called Trayvon’s Law; during our sit-in we demanded to speak with the Governor (Rick Scott) to ask him to call a special legislative session to discuss the bills. He met with us on day 3 of our sit-in and said he would not call the session.
So we went to the second option, and began calling legislators one by one to attempt to gather enough ‘yes’ votes from them to call a special session. That was not successful, however that month-long experience has changed my life. I understood policymaking and learned how to read statutes, I witnessed committee meetings that were full of lawmakers who were mostly white, mostly men. It was like I was in a different reality, watching people who, by their own words I could tell had no clue what it was like to live poor, to live in a body that was judged and criminalized just for existing. There were hardly any regular, working class people sitting behind a name plate with a mic in their face and glass of water on the table in front of them. This stuck with me and I became determined to be involved in actually changing horrible laws like Stand Your Ground and Zero Tolerance Policies in public schools, which created what I learned was called the school to prison pipeline. Learning about the inequities in maternal and infant care I later became familiar with the term cradle-to-prison pipeline.
Reproductive justice addresses the intersectionalities of race, gender and class. For people who do choose to have kids, we also have to struggle for the safety, health and wellness of our communities. This includes our right to have affordable and safe housing, communities safe from violence and racism; interpersonal and at the hands of government programs like gentrification, aka “revitalization”. This coupled with the racial bias in the healthcare field that causes harm and avoidable deaths in maternal and infant health in the United States create a dangerous environment for black mamas, children, families and communities. We are in a state of emergency in Florida and across the U.S., but especially in the South. The issue of racism coupled with gun violence is a public health crisis that has an impact on our health, life expectancies, and the overall wellbeing of our communities.
The murder of Ajike “AJ” Owens should anger and concern everyone. People of all races, genders, and economic status should care, parents and nonparents alike should care. Her tragic, completely unavoidable and unjust death should be a source of pain and anger for everyone who learns the news. The culture around weapons and instigating a reason to use deadly force has gone too far in Florida, and the racism that is pervasive in the South all but gives racist white supremacists a license to kill. People like Susan Lorincz, George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn (who killed Jordan Davis for playing loud music in public in 2012), were all confident in their actions; hunting down, antagonizing, brutalizing and murdering black bodies, simply because of their whiteness and what they feel is their proximity to authority and power.
The legal and legislative systems have also proven that they have a right to feel authority over black people by protecting them in many cases when they murder people because of their racist beliefs. Black communities have been organizing and rebuilding for decades, centuries really. Our collective work has proven fruitful and revolutionary yet at every turn our government has worked to undue our progress and further strip us of our human rights via the legal and legislative systems. But the more of us who get involved in the process, the more political power we build, the less powerful they will be. We should all fight for reproductive justice because, quite literally, our future depends on it. It can be triggering, saddening and feel hopeless to be in the struggle for liberation; so we pause and honor our feelings, we grieve and we provide a safe haven to one another from the ills of this world, but we must keep fighting. For mamas like Ajike “AJ” Owens.
Black in Repro is a workgroup in the Floridians for Reproductive Freedomcoalition that is made up of organizers, political operatives, consultants, providers, founders, community organizations, and researchers and experts in contraceptive access, abortion and prenatal doula care, policymaking, youth engagement, strategy, event planning and more. We aim to build a network of Black Floridians committed to a reproductive justice framework that drives policy and produces sustainable change for Black communities. Read our Statement on the murder here.
CALL TO ACTION: JusticeForAJOwens.org
Sign the petition seeking an immediate investigation and arrest of AJ Owens’ killer.