Woman accused of shoving boy into suitcase and leaving him to suffocate found guilty of murder

AND Florida woman accused of locking her boyfriend in a suitcase and leaving him there to suffocate was found guilty of murder on Friday, four years after what she initially described to authorities as a case of a drunken hide-and-seek gone wrong.

An Orange County jury found Sarah Boone guilty of second-degree murder in the February 2020 death of Jorge Torres Jr., court records show.

Torres was found dead in their Winter Park apartment after Boone said she pinned him inside a suitcase while playing hide-and-seek, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Boone said she thought it was funny and that the couple had allegedly been drinking.

She said she went upstairs and passed out, and when she woke up, she realized Torres was still inside the suitcase. When she unfastened it, Torres did not respond.

Bun testified at her trialtelling the court the two had been drinking outside their apartment and when she went inside she assumed they were going to sleep, but Torres had allegedly settled into a large suitcase.

“I thought to myself, ‘Oh man, we’re obviously not going to sleep anytime soon.’ And I came over and he was trying to get up so I couldn’t tell he was there,” she said.

Boon told the court: “I just zipped it up, we thought it was funny and joked that it was small enough to fit in a suitcase.”

She said she “moved it a little bit” while Torres was in the suitcase.

“We joked and laughed about it,” she said.

Boone said at one point the suitcase fell and she decided to talk to him about his alleged abusive behavior. She also pulled out her mobile phone and started filming, she told the court.

In the videos, Boone allegedly abused Torres as he pleaded for help, NBC affiliate WESH Daytona Beach reports. In the clips, she could be heard telling him it was “For everything you’ve done to me.”

When Torres said he couldn’t breathe, Boone said, “It’s your business. Oh, this is what I feel when you suffocate me,” the TV channel reported.

Boone testified that “Torres’s tone changed” when he was in the suitcase and the two began to argue.

“What he was saying really scared me, he was swearing at me and threatening me,” she told the court. “He warmed up very quickly.”

Boone said Torres started pushing the suitcase and she was afraid he was going to get out. When he was able to get his hand out of the suitcase, she hit him on the arm with a baseball bat until he put it back inside.

She told the court that she went upstairs and fell asleep. When she woke up, she assumed Torres had left the apartment, then “saw the suitcase and remembered last night.”

The state said Boone was not in immediate danger when she refused to unzip the suitcase, according to WESH. Prosecutors said Boone killed her boyfriend because she believed he deserved to die because of his past actions.

It is expected that she will be sentenced on December 2.

This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com.