The Unknowable Question

Why did my uncle kill his three-year-old daughter?

Nearly six months ago, my uncle Jared murdered his three year old daughter in an unconscionable act of brutality. It was the culmination of a prolonged harassment and slander campaign against her mother and the last vestige of his coercive control. His actions deserve a reckoning, but there isn’t one to be had. He killed himself before we even knew to look for her body and, in doing so, never faced any of the pain that followed.

Any stranger could have surmised what happened from just the initial details. Amidst a “bitter” custody dispute, as many attempts to protect children are labeled, a father chooses to commit suicide. It’s his visitation day but there’s no sign of the child, dead or alive. Not only that, this is his first visitation since learning that the child and her mother have been granted permission to move out of state.

You don’t need to know about the previous restraining orders against Jared or his documented dangerous behavior to intuit that something sinister has happened. Even if this hadn’t have been my own family, my immediate reaction would have been the same— that child is dead and the father is to blame. In retrospect, I believe this is why Jared’s cause of death was originally omitted from broadcast. There was video of him jumping off the roof of the parking lot, alone, so suicide was not in question. Still, the police asked the community to search for a missing girl whose father had been “found deceased,” the ambiguity adding more urgency.

In some twisted sense, the general pieces of what happened fit together. That’s not to say that killing your own child is a logical decision for someone in Jared’s self-made position. It’s just an outcome that one could predict, or at least fear, because it’s a choice that many others as spiteful as him have opted for.

Six months later, I can’t say that this is still true. But right after Ellie’s death, her mother told me that her grieving tears paled in comparison to the amount she’d fearfully cried during the visitations leading up to the murder. Though it was still a great shock, she had known all along that something like this could and maybe even would happen.

At the same time, none of this makes any sense at all.

Why?

Why? Why? Why?

I’ve tried as hard as I can to answer this question by conducting hours of interviews, deeply diving into his digital footprint, and pouring over past texts, emails, and phone call recordings.

Trying to understand the autopsy, I’ve left my own google search history in a flurry of medical questions:

• What is a subgaleal hemhorrage?

• What are washerwoman’s hands? autopsy

• soft tissue edema

• skin slippage

• focal scleral hemhorrage

• why no rigor mortis

and on and on it goes.

Until I asked the court to supervise his visits with Ellie, Jared had a large presence in my life. When I was her age, I’d wrap myself around the bottom of his leg as he walked throughout my grandma’s house calling out my name and pretending to look for me. I’d just hold tight and laugh and laugh and laugh.

In elementary school I brought in the photos he sent back from world travels for show and tell. As I got older there were concerts and beach days and escape rooms. We went surfing and kayaking. Visited NASA and watched documentaries and practiced our language acquisition with one another.

He didn’t allow his daughter to experience a single one of those things.

He’d talked for so long about wanting to be a father. The universe gave him that gift.

So what the fuck happened?

Although Ellie and her mom were moving, the custody order was generous and actually allowed Jared to have significantly longer stretches of time with the baby. Also, the move wasn’t scheduled for several months later. That all rules out the heartbroken and desperate dad mental breakdown excuse. This wasn’t supposed to be the last time he saw his daughter, he turned it into that.

I’ve also learned that Jared was lying about the amount of time he already had with Ellie. He had told multiple people that being a full-time dad impeded his ability to work and was gathering donations under false pretenses. He was scamming his own mother. He was trying to scam his own church. And as we’ll get to in the next post, this was not the first time he pulled such a ruse.

Hours before the murder, Jared forwarded the letter he sent to the church to a friend. It read:

Good Afternoon Pastor [Redacted],

I’m in a dilemma and find myself $15,000 short in legal fees required to complete the final phase of my custody trial, in regards to my daughter Ellie.

My failure to come up with the funds prior to July 18th will result in having to represent myself in court, which is equivalent to losing the trial by forfeit, due to the nature of the case. Should that occur, my daughter Ellie will be relocated in the coming months, where she will be raised in a violent environment.

Prayer appreciated in regards to this situation having a positive outcome for Ellie. God has done so much for Ellie up to this point so I will continue to believe God sees us through the remainder of this process.

Do you know anyone who may be in a position to provide a short term loan of any amount? If so, I can be reached at [redacted phone number], or meet in person to discuss. I have $40,000 in retirement funds which have been set aside to repay anyone who lends funds, along with +25% interest, but I have no way to access these funds until after the trial is completed, 3 months from now.

I feel as though I’m in the final stretch of a marathon.

The first custody evaluation ended December 2022, they found in my favor. For the last two years I’ve consistently been granted more and more time with Ellie. After 18 months of home inspections, observations, interviews of friends and family, they have decided that it’s in Ellie’s best interests to have a significant amount of time with me, her Father. Ellie is in my care 55% of of all days and is currently thriving. The current relocation trial is an attempt to overturn the previous decisions which were all in my favor up to this point being the only stay at home parent Ellie has had. I’ve been working evenings/remote/hybrid.

I successfully came up with the first $85,000 on my own which I paid in legal costs to get to this point, but have exhausted all options available to me and am unable on short notice to come up with the final $15,000.

Again, more questions. And this time, more lies.

The move was approved two days earlier. An extra $15k wouldn’t change that. Would he have spared her if he got the money? Or was he determined to kill her because you can’t pretend to be your child’s primary caregiver when she lives in another state?

Was this an attempt to throw investigators off the trail?

This would track with him telling my grandma that he had “good news” while Ellie was in his trunk. Same with him telling another relative that he’d found a loophole in the case that would prevent Ellie and her mom from moving, right before delivering blow after blow.

“Look officer, I didn’t kill her! I was still fighting the case!”

But if so, what changed?

Taking out the trash used to be a routine chore. Any accompanying contemplation was limited to remembering which day of the week the truck would arrive. After Ellie was found in the landfill, the simple task became much heavier.

In those moments, “why” falls by the wayside. No matter the reason, how could you throw your own child in a dumpster?