Mother of 3-year-old found dead at recycling center feared ex-husband would harm daughter

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The mother of a 3-year-old girl whose body was found in a San Francisco Bay Area recycling center over the weekend said Tuesday she feared for her daughter’s well-being whenever the child was with her ex-husband, who authorities said died by suicide and is suspected in the child's death.

San Jose police said an employee in the processing area of a San Jose recycling facility found Ellie Lorenzo’s body Saturday. She was last seen alive with her father, Jared Lorenzo, who was involved in a bitter custody battle with the child's mother and died Friday from an apparent suicide in San Francisco. The San Jose Police Department said in a statement Tuesday that Lorenzo, 42, is a suspect in the girl’s death.

“Ellie was stolen from me, her grandmother and the rest of our family and friends in an evil and brutal manner,” the child’s mother, Chrystal Obi, said in the statement posted on social media. Obi didn't respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Obi said that Lorenzo had learned that the court had ruled she could move with her daughter out of state before he picked up the child Thursday from her home in Mountain View, California, for a court-ordered visitation with the child.

Obi said she 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.

The child was last seen alive with Lorenzo Thursday at a residence in Fremont, 20 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Mountain View, before he drove with the child to his apartment nearby, the San Jose Police Department said in a statement. On Friday, Lorenzo left his apartment at 6 a.m. “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,” the police department said.

That trash bin later was emptied by the garbage company, and Ellie’s body was unknowingly transferred to the recycling facility, authorities said.

Obi said she did not doubt that her ex-husband “killed her” and went to great lengths to cover his 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.

Police said that after dumping the child’s body, Lorenzo drove to several Bay Area cities and stopped in San Francisco, where he was found dead Friday morning from an apparent suicide.

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.

Obi had fought for sole custody since their marriage broke up in 2021, saying the father was “increasingly erratic” and had become “progressively unstable,” according to court records, the Mercury News reported.

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, the newspaper reported.

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This story corrects the spelling of the mother's last name to Obi.