The mother of a toddler killed by her father and dumped in a San Francisco Bay Area trash can said she feared for her daughter’s safety long before the murder-suicide.
The body of little Ellie Lorenzo was discovered at about 4:30 a.m. Saturday at a San Jose recycling center, just two days after she had been sent with court permission to spend the weekend with her father, Jared Lorenzo. Police revealed this.
“Ellie was taken from me, my grandmother, my family and friends in such a wicked and cruel way,” said her grieving mother, Crystal Obi. said in a statement on Wednesday.
Obi said Lorenzo, 42, had only just learned that the court had granted Obi’s request to relocate out of state with their infant daughter before he went to pick her up from their Mountain View home on Thursday.
The suspect is believed to have killed Ellie that night or early in the morning in her Fremont apartment. Police believe he left the apartment around 6 a.m. and drove 20 miles to San Jose, where he dumped Ellie’s body in a trash can.
Before she knew it, the bin had been picked up by a garbage truck and taken to a local recycling facility, where workers found her the next morning.
By then, Lorenzo was dead. He drove through several cities in the San Francisco Bay Area before committing suicide around 11 a.m. Friday.
Obi wrote that she had no doubt that her ex-husband “murdered her” and took every measure to cover up the crime, “moving her to another city, hiding her body in a bag inside a box in a trash can, and driving to another city to commit suicide.”
The heartbroken mother said she feared for Ellie’s safety whenever she was with her father.
“I was anxious for her to be supervised at all times and worried about her safety every time she was with him for court-ordered visitation,” she wrote.
She had been fighting for sole custody of her daughter, alleging that the father had become “increasingly erratic” and “progressively unstable” since the couple’s marriage broke down in 2021, according to court records. Obtained by the Mercury News.
When Ellie was five months old, Obi accused her husband of “emotional abuse” and “gaslighting me with nonsensical excuses.”
Lorenzo “would pace around the room talking to himself and become increasingly agitated,” she said, adding that he would “put tape over the light switches” to keep the lights on.
Authorities have not released the cause of Lorenzo and Ellie’s deaths, and San Jose police said the motive and circumstances of the children’s deaths are still under investigation.
