Mother of 3-year-old found at San Jose recycling center ‘feared constantly’ for daughter’s safety
Family court files reviewed by the Bay Area News Group chronicle the dramatic demise of a toxic 4-year marriage between a Stanford doctor and her husband earning his MBA at UC Berkeley for a career in finance, and the stream of accusations against each other as they fought over their daughter.
SAN JOSE — A few days before Ellie Lorenzo’s little body was found at a San Jose recycling center and her father found dead of an apparent suicide, a family court judge overseeing a bitter custody battle granted her mother permission to move with her 3-year-old daughter out of state.
Ellie’s mother, Stanford radiologist Chrystal Obi, said in a statement Tuesday that the last time she saw her daughter was Thursday morning when she kissed her goodbye at their Mountain View home as she left for court-ordered visitation with her father. Ellie’s body was found by a recycling employee in the processing area early Saturday morning.
“Ellie was stolen from me, her grandmother and the rest of our family and friends in an evil and brutal manner,” Obi said in the statement, her first public remarks since the girl’s body was discovered. “For years, I feared constantly for Ellie’s safety in the hands of her father.”
San Jose Police on Tuesday formally named the father, Jared Lorenzo, as the suspect, saying he was last seen with his daughter Thursday evening at a residence in Fremont 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 her in a trash receptacle.”
That trash bin later was emptied by the garbage company, and Ellie’s body was unknowingly transferred to GreenWaste recycling, off Gish Road in San Jose.
In her statement Tuesday, Ellie’s mother said she had no doubt that her ex-husband “murdered her.”
Lorenzo “went to great lengths to cover his crime,” she said, “hiding her body in a bag inside a box inside a dumpster and driving to another city to take his own life.”
Before noon Friday — several hours after he disposed of Ellie’s body — Lorenzo’s body was found in San Francisco. Police there declined to share any more information about his apparent suicide. When Obi learned of his death, she filed a missing persons report in Fremont for her daughter at 12:25 p.m Friday. Ellie’s body was discovered at the recycling plant at 4:38 a.m. Saturday.
Family court records reviewed by the Bay Area News Group on Tuesday show the mother had fought for sole custody since the marriage broke up in 2021, saying the father was “increasingly erratic” and had become “progressively unstable.”
The father’s cousin, Zinnia Moreno, became embroiled in the battle, saying in a court declaration in late 2021 that Lorenzo “needs help for his paranoia and delusions” and she was “concerned for the safety of both my aunt and her child.”
“I hope that Jared finds peace and healing,” Moreno wrote, “but that his daughter is not negatively affected along the way.”
The court files include 143 separate documents and 29 hearings and chronicle the dramatic demise of a toxic 4-year marriage between a Stanford doctor and her husband earning his MBA at UC Berkeley for a career in finance — and their stream of accusations against each other as they fought over their daughter.
On the surface, the documents show, the parents were living a privileged Silicon Valley life: She was making a healthy salary to afford the extreme housing costs and a live-in nanny and still managed to keep her daughter in designer clothes and enrolled in Gymboree and toddler yoga classes.
Ellie’s room was decorated with a pink Minnie Mouse bed and a Disney Princesses pillow, scores of stuffed animals and a colorful floor mat spelling out the alphabet. Photos in the court file also show Lorenzo smiling next to his daughter, who wore a bow in her hair and a Versace pullover sweatshirt.
Lorenzo boasted of days with his daughter at the Tilden Park steam engines in Orinda, the Oakland Museum and Brushstrokes Studio in Berkeley, where Ellie could paint her own pottery.
“Ellie is thriving during my time with her,” Lorenzo wrote in a court filing in March 2023. “During play dates I have arranged, Ellie is learning how to play nicely with other toddlers and is accelerating her vocabulary.”
He was completing his MBA, he said, “for the sake of improving our daughter’s quality of life.”
But behind closed doors, the marriage had been unraveling since 2021.
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.
When the couple met, she said in court documents, Lorenzo “was nomadic. He had a troubled history with gambling, homelessness and alcoholism with a prior DUI.”
Lorenzo denied Obi’s accusations and threw out his own, saying Obi threatened to make him fail out of grad school.
Obi countered that Lorenzo was “fabricating” stories about her.
Early in the couple’s dispute, as Lorenzo was seeking custody of Ellie as well, and 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 heartbroken.
“We are experiencing an unbearable pain,” Obi wrote. “Our grief is overwhelming.”