SAN JOSE – Days before Ellie Lorenzo's tiny body was present in a San Jose recycling center and her father apparently committed suicide, a family court judge hearing a bitter custody battle granted her mother permission to maneuver to a different state together with her 3-year-old daughter.
Ellie's mother, Stanford radiologist Chrystal Obi, said in an announcement Tuesday that she last saw her daughter Thursday morning, kissing her goodbye at their Mountain View home as she left for a court-ordered visit together with her father. Ellie's body was found early Saturday morning by a recycling employee within the processing area.
“Ellie was taken from me, her grandmother and the rest of our family and friends in a vicious and brutal way,” Obi said within the statement, her first public comments for the reason that girl's body was discovered. “For years, I constantly feared for Ellie's safety in the hands of her father.”
San Jose police officially named the daddy, Jared Lorenzo, as a suspect on Tuesday. He was last seen along with his daughter at a Fremont apartment on Thursday night before driving to his own apartment nearby. On Friday, Lorenzo left his apartment at 6 a.m., police said, “and drove to the city of San Jose, where he removed Ellie's body from the trunk of his vehicle and disposed of it in a trash can.”
This trash can was later emptied by garbage collectors and Ellie's body was taken to the GreenWaste recycling center on Gish Road in San Jose without her knowledge.
In her statement on Tuesday, Ellie's mother said she had little doubt that her ex-husband “murdered” her.
Lorenzo “went to great lengths to cover up his crime,” she said. “He hid her body in a bag in a box in a dumpster and drove to another city to take his own life.”
Lorenzo's body was present in San Francisco at noon on Friday – several hours after he dumped Ellie's body. Police there wouldn’t release any further details about his suspected suicide. When Obi learned of his death, she filed a missing person report for her daughter in Fremont at 12:25 p.m. on Friday. Ellie's body was discovered on the recycling plant at 4:38 a.m. on Saturday.
Family court records viewed by the Bay Area News Group on Tuesday show that the mother had been fighting for sole custody for the reason that divorce in 2021. She said the daddy had change into “increasingly unpredictable” and “increasingly unstable.”
The father's cousin, Zinnia Moreno, was also involved within the dispute. In a court statement in late 2021, she said Lorenzo “needed help for his paranoia and delusions” and that she was “concerned for the safety of my aunt and her child.”
“I hope Jared finds peace and healing,” Moreno wrote, “but that his daughter is not negatively affected in the process.”
The court records include 143 individual documents and 29 hearings and describe the dramatic end of a four-year, toxic marriage between a Stanford doctor and her husband, who earned his MBA at UC Berkeley to pursue a profession in finance – and the flood of mutual accusations they hurled at one another of their dispute over their daughter.
On the surface, the documents show, the parents lived a privileged life in Silicon Valley: She earned enough to afford extremely high housing costs and a live-in nanny, and still managed to provide her daughter with designer clothes and enroll her in Gymboree and toddler yoga classes.
Ellie's room was decorated with a pink Minnie Mouse bed and a Disney Princess pillow, dozens of stuffed animals and a colourful doormat with the alphabet. Photos within the court filing also show Lorenzo smiling next to his daughter, who wore a bow in her hair and a Versace sweatshirt.
Lorenzo bragged in regards to the days he spent along with his daughter on the steam engines of Tilden Park in Orinda, the Oakland Museum, and Brushstrokes Studio in Berkeley, where Ellie could paint her own pottery.
“Ellie is thriving as I spend time with her,” Lorenzo wrote in a court document in March 2023. “During the play dates I have arranged, Ellie is learning how to play nicely with other toddlers and expanding her vocabulary.”
He is completing his MBA, he said, “to improve our daughter’s quality of life.”
But behind closed doors, the wedding has been threatening to collapse since 2021.
When Ellie was five months old, Obi accused her husband of “emotional abuse” and “he made up nonsense excuses for me.”
Lorenzo “walks around the room, talking to himself and becoming increasingly agitated,” she said, and “tapes the light switches” to maintain them on.
When the couple met, she said in court documents, Lorenzo was “a nomad. He had a troubled past involving gambling, homelessness and alcoholism, as well as a previous drunk driving conviction.”
Lorenzo denied Obi's allegations and refuted his own, saying Obi had threatened to make him drop out of graduate school.
Obi replied that Lorenzo was “making up” stories about her.
At the beginning of the couple's dispute, Lorenzo also desired to seek custody of Ellie. He said he was “determined to be a great father and give my children the love my father gave me.”
Instead, Ellie’s mother is left inconsolable.
“We are experiencing unbearable pain,” Obi wrote. “Our grief is overwhelming.”
Originally published:
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