Dad killed toddler, dumped body in trash in murder-suicide during bitter custody battle

The mother of a toddler who was killed by her father and thrown in a San Francisco Bay area dumpster said she feared for her daughter’s safety long before the murder-suicide.

Little Ellie Lorenzo’s body was found in a San José recycling center around 4:30 a.m. Saturday, just two days after she was sent to spend a court-sanctioned weekend with her dad, Jared Lorenzo, police said.

“Ellie was stolen from me, her grandmother and the rest of our family and friends in an evil and brutal manner,” the grieving mother, Chrystal Obi, said in a statement Wednesday.

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Lorenzo, 42, had just learned that a court had granted Obi’s request to move with her daughter out of state before he picked up the toddler Thursday from their home in Mountain View, according to Obi.

He allegedly killed Ellie in his Fremont apartment sometime that night or early morning — police suspect he left around 6 a.m. and drove 20 miles to San José, where he ditched her body in a trash can.

The bin was unwittingly picked up by a garbage truck and brought to a local recycling facility, where a worker found her the next morning.

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By that time, Lorenzo was dead — he drove through multiple Bay Area cities before taking his own life in San Francisco around 11 a.m. Friday.

Obi said she had no doubt that her ex-husband “killed her” and went to great lengths to cover the crime, “moving her to a different city, hiding her body in a bag inside a box inside a dumpster and driving to another city to take his own life,” she wrote.

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The heartbroken mother said she had worried about Ellie’s safety whenever the child was with her father.

“I wanted desperately for her constant supervision and worried for her safety each time she was with him for court ordered visitation,” she wrote.

She had been fighting for sole custody of the girl since the couple’s marriage fell apart in 2021, saying the father was “increasingly erratic” and had become “progressively unstable,” 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 excuses that don’t make sense.”

Lorenzo “moves around the room talking to himself and becomes increasingly agitated,” she said, and “places tape over the light switches” to keep them on.”

Authorities have not said how Lorenzo or Ellie died. The motive and circumstances surrounding the child’s death are still under investigation, the San Jose Police Department said.

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