Neighbors of Mark Sievers say they’ve been pressured to call him ‘mentally unstable,’ but refused

Potential jurors in the Mark Sievers trial have been answering a lot of death penalty questions this week.

Sievers’ neighbors in Bonita Springs say they’ve also been asked a lot of questions about the same thing. They say there was only one right answer.

Whatever they already think of their former neighbor, there’s been someone coming by trying to make them use a certain phrase to describe him.

“He kept trying for me to say that…Right? He’s mentally unstable, right,” said Kimberly Torres.

She’s done a lot of interviews since the murder, but this one was different.

“He kept wanting me to say that it was somebody crazy; a lunatic only would do
things like that,” she said.

And, she says, it was relentless. “He had to be out here on the front porch for about two hours.”

Torres says she and other neighbors have already interviewed with an investigator for the Sievers legal team, specifically for the “death penalty phase,” if he’s found guilty and faces death row.

Her mother, who lives one street over behind the Sievers house, says she was also interviewed.

“He was trying to lead me into saying that he was crazy and I never once said he was crazy,” she said.

Neither thinks he should be cut any break for what they’re both sure he did.

“There was no doubt in my mind he did it,” said Torres.

So rather than the words that the investigator wanted to hear, these neighbors would rather focus on another one.

“I just hope that…what I would like to see is the girls get justice because they
miss out on having their mother in their life,” said Torres’ mother.

Torres is on the prosecution’s witness list, so she isn’t allowed to speak to the press.

We want to be clear: We shot this interview and others with her well before she was added to that list.