California Bay Area investigators continue piecing together the details of the tragic murder-suicide of Jared Lorenzo, formerly known as Jared Huggins, who in mid-July killed his three-year-old daughter before taking his own life amid a lengthy and bitter custody dispute.
Lorenzo's body was discovered in San Francisco on the morning of Friday, July 12, less than a day after he'd picked up his daughter, Ellie Obi Lorenzo, for what was to be his final unsupervised visitation before Ellie and her mother, Chrystal Obi, were to move to Texas after receiving permission from a custody judge to leave California.
The discovery of Lorenzo's body triggered a frantic search for Ellie, who had been seen with Lorenzo the prior evening. Sadly, investigators discovered the child's body a day later, which Lorenzo had placed inside a bag and box and thrown into a dumpster, which was found at a waste facility in San Jose. A coroner determined that Ellie died of blunt force trauma.
The case immediately garnered widespread media attention throughout the Bay Area, with acknowledgments that a system designed to protect children from dangerous situations had utterly failed in Ellie's circumstance. San Jose PD Sergeant Jorge Garibay described to San Jose's KRON4 that Ellie’s death was an “absolute tragic loss. It’s horrendous. Whatever answers that we get, there’s going to be no way to make sense of a tragic loss like this.”
Court system disregarded plentiful warning signs
Another Bay Area outlet, San Francisco's ABC7, obtained more than three years of court documents detailing the custody battle between Lorenzo and Obi, who parted ways soon after Ellie's birth in 2021. Obi and others complained to the court about Lorenzo's erratic behavior and possible drug addiction, though multiple custody judges issued varying decrees and ultimately allowed Lorenzo unsupervised visitation not long before the murder-suicide.
"Obviously they lifted the supervision, they gave him access and that is what he used to murder the child," Joan Meier, Clinical Law professor at the George Washington University Law School, told ABC7. "We see this often. There are more than 100 documented cases of children being murdered by a parent. Not always a father, sometimes a mother, but the majority are fathers after a court refuses to protect a child from that parent."
A GoFundMe campaign set up for the benefit of Obi and to pay for Ellie's funeral expenses has already topped $142,000 of a stated $150,000 goal. Since its creation, hundreds of contributors have donated to the campaign.
Name change may have hid Lorenzo's troubled 'Huggins' past
It's not clear from the Bay Area news reports that the various investigators nor Ellie's maternal family were fully aware of Lorenzo's troubled past, which had seemingly turned for the better over a decade earlier, when he became a minor star of sorts on the 2+2 poker forums and landed a shot on PokerStars' original Big Game show as one of the 'Loose Cannon' players, amateurs who were backed into the game by PokerStars and were eligible to pocket those winnings.
Huggins, which was Lorenzo's original name, appeared in a handful of Season 2 episodes that aired in 2011. He was one of several players chosen to compete after competing in numerous online qualifiers hosted by PokerStars, which at the time was widely available across the US. Huggins was one of seven amateurs chosen to compete in Season 2 after submitting an audition video, beating out a couple of hundred other would-be participants.
Huggins attracted a following on 2+2, posting as 'RelaxedPrecision', where he detailed his struggles at trying to make it in online poker while actually being homeless and living in and playing from his car. He also acknowledged ongoing substance-abuse issues and claimed to have been born in a crack den. Highlights of his many posts were later gathered on Reddit, though opinions changed of late when the news that he'd murdered his daughter came to light.
Though his appearance on the Big Game was wholly unsuccessful, it did temporarily open other doors, and he briefly worked in the business world in a couple of different roles. By the end of the 2010s, however, he had largely disappeared from public view. It was at about this time that he relocated from the Los Angeles area to Oakland, changed his last name from Huggins to Lorenzo, and began a new life of sorts, including his relationship with Obi. Online records available from several sources continue to list him as Huggins with 'Lorenzo' as an alias, and it is not clear whether he legally changed his last name or instead obtained fraudulent identification.
