Father identified as a suspect in killing of a 3-year-old toddler in San Francisco

Ellie Lorenzo, a 3-year-old, died from “craniocerebral injuries due to Blunt head trauma,” according to the Santa Clara County Office of the Medical Examiner-Coroner, whose body was discovered on Saturday at a recycling facility in San Jose.  Ellie’s father, Jared Lorenzo of Fremont, was named a suspect in Ellie’s death by San Jose police on Tuesday. Following her discovery that Lorenzo had committed suicide early on Friday morning, her mother, Chrystal Obi of Mountain View, filed a missing person’s report on Friday.

Only the fact that Lorenzo passed away in San Francisco and that no foul play is suspected will be confirmed by San Francisco police. According to KTVU-TV, the manager of a barbershop on O’Farrell Street in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco said she heard him fall and discovered his dead right outside the door of her establishment.

After Ellie and Lorenzo’s marriage ended in 2021, Obi sued for exclusive custody of Ellie, citing his “increasingly erratic” and “progressively unstable” behavior, according to family court records obtained by the Bay Area News Group.

According to a report released by San Jose Police on Tuesday, Lorenzo was last seen with his daughter on Thursday night in a Fremont home before making his way to his own adjacent apartment. According to the authorities, Lorenzo traveled to San Jose on Friday morning after removing Ellie’s body from the trunk of his car and throwing it in a garbage can. Lorenzo had left his residence at six in the morning.

Later, when the garbage company emptied that trash can, Ellie’s body was inadvertently moved to GreenWaste recycling, which is located off Gish Road in San Jose.

Obi in a statement Tuesday said that she had no doubt that her ex-husband “murdered” Ellie and that Lorenzo “went to great lengths to cover his crime” by “hiding her body in a bag inside a box inside a dumpster and driving to another city to take his own life.”