Father questions San Jose police response after tech CEO daughter found dead – East Bay Times
Oct 13, 2019
On Sunday, a picture drawn by a neighborhood boy lay under a bouquet of roses at the site where Erin Valenti’s body was found. Valenti, a tech CEO from Utah, was visiting the Bay Area when she went missing Oct. 7. Her body was found in the back seat of her rental car on Saturday in San Jose’s Almaden neighborhood.
SAN JOSE — As a family and a community grapple with how the body of a 33-year-old tech CEO was unnoticed on a residential street — possibly for days — her father is accusing San Jose police of botching the search for her.
A day after Erin Valenti was
found dead in the back seat of her rental car on a street in San Jose’s quiet Almaden neighborhood, questions are emerging about how authorities handled her missing person case.
[...]
Along with the shock and grief the discovery brought Valenti’s family, it also raised painful questions. How did she die? How long had her body been there before it was found? How had no one noticed her? And was there more that could have been done to find Valenti before it was too late?
“The beginning of it was a charade,” Erin Valenti’s father, Joseph Valenti, said of the police department’s search for his daughter. “And I am totally frustrated and pissed off with how that was conducted.”
Public information officers for the San Jose Police Department did not address those questions Sunday.
“We’re not sharing additional details at this time since the investigation is open and ongoing,” Sgt. Enrique Garcia wrote in an email.
[...]
Erin Valenti, who would have turned 34 on Wednesday, had been in Southern California and then the Bay Area for a workshop and a tech conference, and to visit old friends and colleagues. “Heading to SF and LA soon…whose (sic) around? DM me!!” she posted on Facebook Sept. 25. It would be her last post.
Valenti’s family went to the police, who spoke to her by phone and went looking for her, but were not able to locate her, her family said. But Joseph Valenti said despite all of the information his family gave the police — the make, model and license plate of her rental car, descriptions of her erratic behavior on the phone, and data tracking her last phone call to the Almaden neighborhood —
police didn’t file an official missing person report for Erin Valenti until Thursday. And when they did, they described her as voluntarily missing, Joseph Valenti said. The police told the family that she was an adult, and she could have just taken off for a few days, her father said. The result, he said, was that the department didn’t make searching for her a priority.
“That’s ********,” Joseph Valenti said, “because she was due for a flight out of San Jose airport back to Salt Lake City.”
Disappointed with the police department’s response, the family set up a “Help Find Erin Valenti” Facebook page, and received an outpouring of love, support and Bay Area locals who volunteered to search. It was one of those Facebook volunteers who finally found Erin Valenti’s gray SUV parked at the curb of a suburban San Jose street, looked inside, and discovered her body in the back seat, Joseph Valenti said.
[...]
“It’s really strange, bizarre, foggy to me. Because this kind of stuff just doesn’t usually go down in Almaden,” said 56-year-old Ralph Elongo, who lives around the corner from where the car was found. “What else seems weird is that none of us noticed. And we’re a pretty tight neighborhood. So I’m pretty tripped out.”
^^bbm
