I am the first to admit that I’m a gullible person. I believe others. I don’t know why–I just assume they’re telling the truth. Maybe it’s because I’m a generally truthful person, it doesn’t occur to me that other people go through their days lying.
Over the last four-and-a-half years, however, I have concluded that Sarah Boone is lying about the death of her boyfriend, Jorge Torres. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that she’s lying about all kinds of things, and not just to others; she’s lying to herself.
Sarah’s claims that she and Jorge were playing hide and seek is absurd. First, we’re talking about two fully grown 40-year-olds in a one-bedroom townhouse. It’s just not believable. Second, Sarah told the first police officer on the scene that one of them began the game by saying, “Tag, you’re it!” (she didn’t specify which of them said it), and that’s not how one begins a game of hide and seek. Third, the young man living in the apartment next door said he could hear Sarah and Jorge screaming at each other for hours before a sudden silence, followed fifteen or twenty minutes later by the sound of something heavy falling down the stairs. Based on the evidence currently available (I’m writing this a week before the trial is going to start), I think there are two primary scenarios that are likely.
Scenario #1: They got drunk and began fighting, and Sarah hit Jorge in the head with a baseball bat, knocking him unconscious. She then put him in the suitcase because she was still angry and because she didn’t want him to call the police on her. In a rage, she kicked the suitcase down the stairs. This woke Jorge up, and she made the two infamous videos taunting him while he was in the suitcase. She’s obviously wasted in these videos; she’s slurring so badly I can’t understand some of what she says. She decided to leave him in the suitcase overnight, stumbled upstairs, drunk dialed her ex-husband and talked to him for a couple of minutes, then passed out.
Scenario #2: This scenario begins the same way: after hours of drunken fighting, Sarah hit Jorge in the head with the baseball bat. In this version, however, she thought she had killed him. In order to get his body out of the apartment, she decided to put him in the suitcase. She also threw in a bloody pillowcase, figuring she might as well dispose of all of the evidence together.
Next, she pushed the suitcase down the stairs. If she believed Jorge was dead, why bother getting him downstairs carefully? The tumble down the stairs woke Jorge, however, and Sarah realized he wasn’t yet dead. Relieved and attempting to justify to herself that her actions were warranted, she made the videos of herself telling him that he deserved to be in the suitcase because he’d cheated on her. Then she went upstairs, called Brian, and fell asleep.
I don’t have concrete evidence of either of these scenarios. They’re just theories. But they fit with the evidence we have so far. In both, Sarah is culpable for Jorge’s death. I think there’s a critical piece of evidence missing, though, and that’s what Sarah knew regarding positional asphyxia.
Most people don’t know what positional asphyxia is. Unlike strangulation, where a person’s airflow is cut off entirely, in positional asphyxia the body is placed in such a position that the person can’t breathe deeply enough to take in sufficient oxygen, but that position may or may not involve their windpipe. Because they’re getting some oxygen, however, it takes them a long time to die. Most people assume that if you’re taking in enough air that you can speak, you must not be slowly suffocating. For example, ask ten people what Jesus’s medical cause of death was and maybe one will know he died of positional asphyxia. Two, tops. Crucifixion kills by placing the arms above the head and reducing the ability of the legs to lift the torso, so the chest can’t expand properly and the lungs can’t inflate fully. That’s why is often takes two or three days to kill a person. (That’s also why the soldier stabbing Jesus with his spear was considered an act of mercy. The blood loss further reduced his body’s ability to carry oxygen, so Jesus was “only” on the cross for six hours before dying.)
Some years ago now, there was a heart-breaking case of positional asphyxia in Georgia in which a teenage boy was found upside down in a rolled up gym mat. One of this shoes had fallen into the space in the center of the mat, and he appeared to have crawled headfirst down into the mat to try to retrieve it, then been unable to get out again. Being upside down and wrapped in the rolled mat, he was unable to inhale fully. (The case is haunting, not only because of how he died, but because there’s evidence he may actually have been murdered and shoved into the mat. Due to police corruption in the area, we’ll likely never know.)
Did Sarah know about the potential for positional asphyxia when she locked Jorge in the suitcase? Do most people? Despite the many many typos in her letters, Sarah isn’t stupid, but positional asphyxia isn’t something that people intuitively understand. I think it’s possible she assumed that – if the baseball bat and the trip down the stairs didn’t kill him – spending the night in the suitcase wouldn’t either.
Now, most of us would argue that inflicting a serious head wound was enough that she’s responsible for his death. I’m not suggesting that her culpability is in any way reduced just because she didn’t know that leaving him in the suitcase would kill him. What I’m suggesting is that part of how Sarah justifies to herself that she’s innocent is that she didn’t know about positional asphyxia.
Sarah seems to be the type of criminal who will lie about as much as she can and only admit to the things she can’t rationally deny. She never admitted to hitting him in the head with the baseball bat, and I assume her claim that she hit his fingers with it was just a way of explaining why his DNA was on the bat. She’s never admitted to pushing him down the stairs. As far as she’s concerned, those things didn’t happen. The only thing she expects to be held accountable for is leaving him in the suitcase overnight, and she doesn’t feel she did anything wrong in that regard because she really didn’t understand that being in the suitcase could kill him. Hence, in her mind, she isn’t guilty.
Does it make any sense to the rest of us? No. But Sarah isn’t interested in the truth, only in herself and what she wants, and she wants to be found innocent.
Perish the Thought 