Gainesville woman arrested after shooting gun inside neighbor’s screened utility room

Staff report

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Anita S. Torres, 59, was arrested yesterday after allegedly entering her neighbor’s screened utility room and firing a gun.

At about 11:54 a.m. on March 25, a Gainesville Police Department officer responded to a home in the Highland Court Manor neighborhood, where the male victim said he went outside after the female victim heard a noise in their utility room, which is screened and attached to their home. The male victim said he saw Torres’s empty wheelchair sitting outside the utility room, and the glass door was shattered.

The male victim said Torres had a gun, and when he asked her what she was doing, she started screaming at him and then went back to her wheelchair. The male victim went back inside his home and told the female victim to call the police; both victims said they were in fear for their safety because Torres had a gun.

The victims told the officer that Torres went to their front door and started yelling at them about being on her “uninhabited property”; they said Torres does not live in the home or own the property. The address listed for Torres is near the victims’ home.

A search incident to arrest reportedly produced a live round in Torres’s pocket that matched the round in the loaded .45 caliber firearm.

The officer reported that a shell casing was found inside the victims’ utility room, and a hole had been shot into the rear glass door; the round traveled through the glass and through a metal shed in the victims’ back yard, but the officer was unable to find where it landed. The officer noted that there is a home directly behind the victims’ home, and the round could easily have entered another home or injured someone.

Post Miranda, Torres reportedly admitted to going to the victims’ home, firing a round, breaking the glass window on the utility room door, and reloading the gun. She said she shot the gun because she is tired of the male victim using his mind to torment her dog; she said she was not trying to shoot any person. She said that after shooting the gun, she got back into her wheelchair and went to the victims’ front door, with the gun on her lap. She said she never pointed the gun at the male victim, and he should not have been in fear for his safety.

Torres has been charged with armed burglary, two counts of burglary with assault, and firing a weapon into a dwelling. She has 13 felony convictions (four violent) and 28 misdemeanor convictions (non-violent), all before 2010; she has served one state prison sentence and was released in 2006. Judge Meshon Rawls ordered her held without bail pending a hearing on a motion from the State Attorney’s Office to hold her without bail until trial; if the judge denies the motion, bail will be set at that hearing.

Articles about arrests are based on reports from law enforcement agencies. The charges listed are taken from the arrest report and/or court records and are only accusations. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.