The First 24 Hours

I wouldn’t admit it for many days, but I knew he had killed her as soon as I heard that he killed himself […] Still, I didn’t want to be right. It was time to search.

It had been a while since I talked to Chrystal, though less than two months had passed since the court last asked me to weigh in on the custody matter. As always, I had been steadfast that moving to Texas with her mom was in Ellie’s best interest.

One of the countless lies that Jared told was that he was an active father, but he didn’t give a shit about Ellie long before he murdered her. To him, she was just a prop through which he could engender himself with sympathy. I can’t imagine an end for Jared that didn’t include him begging for money under false pretenses until the day he died. She just ended up the final ruse.

To portray himself as the doting father, Jared took lots of pictures with the baby. Now knowing that his closest friend was a convicted pedophile, I pray that there was nothing more sinister to them.

Sometimes Jared would switch out Ellie’s outfits in between shots, creating a cache of photos to send out to friends and family on the days he had nothing to do with her. Through the picture he painted, he was the primary caregiver and her leaving would be a devastation. In actuality, it would have allowed her to thrive.

Northern California wasn’t the home base of either parent, and isolating both Chrystal and Ellie from their support system had had insidious effects. Meanwhile, I knew the dysfunction and sickness of my own extended family all too well and the reasons why myself and others have struggled with PTSD just from growing up in it. I was so excited for Ellie to have a normal, happy life, my initial reaction to Chrystal’s words was joy.

She started the call by telling me that the judge had approved the move. But my one word “yay” response was quickly interrupted by words that shook me to the core. 

“Do you know where Ellie is?”

She explained that she’d gotten a call informing her that Jared had attempted suicide by jumping off a building in San Francisco. It was his weekday with Ellie but there had been no sign of her. Even more alarming, this was his first overnight visit since receiving the news that their years long custody battle was finally over. 

Nobody that Chrystal had talked to so far seemed to know or care where the baby was, with one relative saying Jared’s recovery was the most important thing to focus on right now. She begged me to find out whatever I could about his movements over the past day and to question the family members I was already distant with about her baby’s whereabouts.

With all the times Chrystal had called me out the blue asking if I thought Jared might hurt Ellie, it was hard for my mind to go anywhere else. I would ask if anything happened recently, for example if he had said anything weird or if the baby had come home with bruises. There had never been something definitive or specific, but his generally alarming behavior was so all encompassing that there was always cause for concern.

I wouldn’t admit it for many days, but I knew he had killed her as soon as I heard that he killed himself. Later on, Chrystal would say the same. Still, I didn’t want to be right. It was time to search.

I first called my mom, who answered the phone sobbing. She had just heard the news about Jared but knew nothing about Ellie being missing or where she might be. I hated to hang up on her while she was clearly in distress, but I was on a mission.

Next, I talked to my dad to help calm myself down. His own contentious divorce with my mom had once strained our relationship, but as things had gotten rough with her side of the family, I came to really appreciate his insights. He talked about a mother’s intuition, praising Chrystal for the steps she’d taken to prevent this situation, and told me that I had tried my best. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear as I was still holding onto hope, but it helped me calm down a little bit to focus better. I made one more fruitless call to a relative before Chrystal called me back again.

Jared was dead. Where was Ellie?

Neither his phone or car had been located and no one seemed to know where he went after picking Ellie up the day before. But now that he was officially gone, I could already see the way this was go and was unhappy to be proven right.

Jared had spent years turning my family against Chrystal with one malicious lie after another. In fact, back in 2021, when she had still hoped that their relationship might be salvageable, she acknowledged this reality in a safety planning document created while on the phone with a domestic violence counselor and myself.

Created on September 5, 2021, deciding whether or not to move back home.

By July, 2024, the anti-Chrystal train no longer required Jared to drive it. The immediate narrative was that the family’s gentle giant had been stolen, driven to the brink of madness by a cruel and vengeful woman. The missing baby didn’t quite fit this narrative but it didn’t even matter.

Some refused to even believe she WAS missing, spreading conspiracy theories that Chrystal had her safe and sound and was lying to make this tragedy about herself. They re-emphasized that Chrystal had used him for a ”light skinned baby,” forgetting that that inappropriate family joke had only started because at the time they got together, no one could figure out why else she might be dating so far below her league. They blamed her for taking away his daughter, assuming that this cost him his will to live, and acted as if no one else in this fucking family tree had ever gotten a divorce before— that he was a victim of a uniquely unimaginable pain. When, in fact, dozens of Huggins’ and adjacent last names have all managed to divorce plenty and not take anyone else to the grave over it.

While her daughter was still missing, presumably murdered, one of my relatives said that they hoped Chrystal spent the rest of her life suffering. That she didn’t die young, but instead lived to old age filled with pain. That the baby would turn up fine, with a babysitter or at a fire station, but Chrystal deserved to pay for “destroying our family.”

Another cussed me all the way out for even daring to suggest that Jared had done something to Ellie, told me I deserved to get my ass beat, and then blocked me. Others prioritized my grandmother’s grief from losing her child over Chrystal’s anguish and requested respect for Jared’s passing as well.

I hadn’t even said an untoward word about him (yet). I just acknowledged the still unproven conclusion that anyone would have immediately jumped to if this was happening within some stranger’s family. As I told them, I wanted anyone literally anyone to prove me wrong. To show me the baby. To turn her back to her mother. To make this be okay.

Now that we know the outcome, I’ve chosen to use this space to depict the man accurately. Through his own choices, he left a carefully constructed blueprint for how he should be considered. He designed this legacy himself.

Chrystal was outside Jared’s apartment during our next call. The police had asked her to stand around the corner before they went in but still hadn’t entered the building. Her screams through the phone were chilling.

“He’s dead! It doesn’t matter anymore! Just kick the door in! What are you waiting for? Where is my child?”

I heard a police officer respond way too calmly, “So what I’m hearing is that you’d like to file a missing persons report?”

Fearing they would find the worst, I wished I wasn’t so far away. She had none of her own family nearby, just as Jared had wanted. Luckily some relatives from up north were able to support with the search and went to her side.

I had expected the police to find blood, something, anything, but there was nothing. I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.

The next few hours were an emotional rollercoaster of false leads and dead ends. Meanwhile, police were piecing together Jared’s movements with CCTV and other means which gave a small bit of hope.

At this point, I had made my way to a local amusement park of all places, to pick up my siblings who were there with a friend. It was an incredibly disorienting contrast between my external surroundings, and what was actually happening in my mind. But I allowed them to wander off out of earshot as I continued doing whatever I could to help find Ellie.

I started reaching out to every single local media outlet because I was shocked that, after five hours, the general public didn’t even know there was a toddler missing in their city. If she was alive, valuable time was being wasted and plenty of people might be forgetting vital information that they didn’t realize was important.

We were five hours into the search and the police still had not issued an AMBER alert. I couldn’t believe it. State government had acknowledged that AMBER alerts were underutilized for missing Black girls and signed the EBONY alert into law on January 1, 2024 in an attempt to rectify it.

Regarding its passing, Kellie Todd Griffin of the CA Black Women’s Collective Empowerment Institute had said:

“It’s very important to have the Ebony Alert because far too often when Black women and children go missing there is little to no publicity which hinders the effort to find them”

Though Ellie didn’t qualify for the EBONY alert itself, the failure to use any and all tools at the police department’s disposal felt like just another devaluation of Black life. The police department hadn’t even shared her photo on their own social media page.

I was able to direct the flurry of media responses to my cousin who was at the Fremont PD station with Chrystal. They set up the following impromptu press conference off the slim chance that someone might recognize and return her.

By now, my up north cousins had really made the missing poster take off on social media. People from all over were sharing it in the hopes of finding Ellie, even though some of her paternal relatives were conspicuously absent. I was using the Internet to the best of my own ability, reaching out to anyone with the ring camera in the neighborhood to check their footage and tapping into the local neighborhood groups on Facebook and other apps.

Police were questioning relatives in both Northern and Southern California to see if anyone had any information. They even showed up at my grandma’s house in Los Angeles to search it, just in case.

By the 11 o’clock broadcast, Ellie was on every news station. It had been 11 hours since she was reported missing and 36 hours since Jared had picked her up. Jared‘s phone was still missing, but the car had been found sans car seat or baby bag.

Early the next morning, I got another call from Crystal:

“Ellie’s dead. He killed her and dumped her in the landfill like she was garbage.”

Then she hung up.