The Extremely Strange Disappearance and Death of Erin Valenti
October 16th, 2019Via: Mercury News:
The family of Erin Valenti stopped its search on Saturday night, shortly after police reported that a body was found in South San Jose’s Almaden Valley, the location where the 33-year-old tech entrepreneur went missing after a series of bewildering phone calls during an apparent mental health episode.
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Valenti went missing Monday night after driving off course from Palo Alto to catch a flight home from the San Jose International Airport.
The San Jose Police Department reported finding a body inside a vehicle parked on the 6500 block of Bose Lane, only a half-mile from Valenti’s last known location, near Almaden Expressway and Camden Avenue. Records show that the San Jose Fire Department responded to a medical call at 3:56 p.m. near 6582 Bose Lane.
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On Saturday, relatives had continued their frantic search for Valenti, who they said apparently suffered a manic episode early in the week, telling them in a string of bizarre phone calls that “it’s all a game, it’s a thought experiment, we’re in the Matrix.”
Her husband said she had no history of mental illness.
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Valenti was founder and CEO of Tinker Ventures, an application design and development company, where she managed a global team of 120 employees in their Salt Lake City and Pakistan offices. Prior to forming Tinker, she was the Head of Product Development for Overstock.com, where she oversaw a team of 250 engineers.
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Nothing seemed amiss until she called her parents about 3:30 p.m. on Monday after she met with a former colleague on Sand Hill Road, and said she couldn’t find her rental car. Once she found the car, she stayed on the phone with her parents, her conversation became bizarre.
Valenti missed her Monday evening flight home to Utah from San Jose International Airport and did not attend a Tuesday ceremony in Utah, where she was looking forward to receiving a “women in tech” award.
“We talked to her for hours on and off” on Monday night, Valenti said. “Her thoughts were disconnected. She talked a mile a minute. She’d say I’m coming home for Thanksgiving, then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,” a reference to a science fiction movie about a virtual reality world.
