Florida mom Ajike Owens shot dead amid years-long feud with neighbor

A Florida mom was shot dead in front of her son by her neighbor following a years-long dispute about her children playing outside, according to police.

Authorities said they cannot charge the unidentified 58-year-old female shooter until detectives can prove that she did not act in self-defense due to Florida’s stand-your-ground laws.

Ajike “AJ” Owens, a 35-year-old mother of four, was shot and killed through her neighbor’s door in Ocala on Friday night in what Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods said was the culmination of a two-and-a-half feud at an apartment complex.

Owens had gone to her neighbors’ home after the woman yelled at her children as they played in a nearby lot, Woods said. The neighbor had also thrown a pair of skates that hit one of the children.

The woman, who is white, also yelled racial slurs at Owens’ children, who are black, according to civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who is representing Owens’ family and also represented Travon Martin’s family in 2012 in a landmark fatal stand-your-ground case. 

Authorities have not yet confirmed whether any slurs were said or if race was a factor in the shooting.

Deputies responded to a trespassing call at the apartment and found Owens suffering from gunshot wounds. She later died at a hospital in Ocala, which is about 80 miles northwest of Orlando.

Owens’ children — ages 12, 9, 7 and 2 — were all at the scene of the shooting when deputies arrived, according to a police report obtained by WKMG.

One of the children told deputies there was a dispute between the neighbor and the children about an iPad left on the ground near the woman’s apartment and the woman threw skates at the kids.

When Owens went to confront the woman about hurting her children and to retrieve the iPad, the neighbor fatally shot her through her door, police said.

Lauren Smith, who lives across the street from where the shooting took place, was on her porch Friday and saw one of the Owens’ young sons pacing, and yelling, “They shot my mama, they shot my mama,” she told the Associated Press.

Smith ran to the house and started doing chest compressions on Owens until EMTs arrived. She said there was no altercation and that the mother did not have a weapon.

The neighbor “was angry all the time that the children were playing out there,” Smith said. “She would say nasty things to them. Just nasty.”

Smith said the neighborhood is “family friendly” and the fact that the shooter is claiming self-defense is “outrageous.”

“I wish our shooter would have called us instead of taking actions into her own hands,” Woods said. “I wish Ms. Owens would have called us in the hopes we could have never gotten to the point at which we are here today.”

Woods said that since January 2021, deputies responded at least a half-dozen times in connection with the feuding between Owens and the shooter.

“My baby was so full of life. She was a single mother of four,” Owens’ mother, Pamela Dias, said during a news conference on Monday. “She loved them with all her being. To know her is to know that her kids were everything. On Friday, June 2, 2023, at approximately 9 p.m., she was rendered voiceless.”

The sheriff said that his office has not yet interviewed Owens’ children — two of whom witnessed the shooting — because investigators first want child therapists to work with them. 

Most of the information the deputies have came from the shooter, Woods said.

“There was a lot of aggressiveness from both of them, back and forth,” Wood said she told investigators. “Whether it be banging on the doors, banging on the walls and threats being made. And then at that moment is when Ms. Owens was shot through the door.”

On Tuesday, a stuffed teddy bear and bouquets of flowers marked the area near where Owens was shot.

About three dozen mostly black protesters gathered outside the Marion County Judicial Center and demanded that Owens’ shooter be arrested.

Florida is among about 30 states that have stand-your-ground laws, which allow residents to defend themselves either by law or court precedent when threatened.

With Post wires