Arizona Father Left Daughter, 2, to Die in Hot Car, Seen Angry and Distraught in Police Bodycam Footage
This Arizona dad left his little girl to die in the hot car while he played video games. He got angry and asked, “Am I being treated like a murderer?” when police approached him, new bodycam footage shows.
Christopher Scholtes, 37, also broke down when police went to his house on July 9 and found his two-year-old daughter Parker barely alive in the family car. He said he had left her there with the air conditioner on for thirty minutes because he didn’t want to wake her up.
“So I’m being treated like a killer?” he told cops when they told him the house might be a crime scene. In the bodycam footage that Inside Edition got, he raised his voice.
The video shows that Scholtes was upset as police first arrived at the house and were trying to save Parker. He paced around the house with his head in his hands.
At one point, he begged, “Please baby, please.” Later, he said on the phone, “I can’t believe this” in a very loud voice.
“She looks really hot right now.” The cops told the father, who had his hands over his face, “We’re going to do everything we can.”
Parker’s mother, an anesthesiologist, came home around 4 p.m. and found her in the car with the AC off. She was in serious condition.
In the video, Scholtes tells police that he only left Parker outside for “no more than 30 to 45 minutes” and that he checked on her the whole time. But later court documents showed that he allegedly left her in the hot car for more than three hours while he was inside and that he did this often with his three daughters.
Erike Scholtes, his wife, texted him after the accident, “I told you to stop leaving them in the car.” “Have I told you before?”
According to a criminal charge, their two other children told police that their father often left them outside in the car while he “played his game and put his food away” while his daughter was outside dying.
Scholtes’ 16-year-old daughter from a previous marriage told KVOA-TV that he often left her alone in cars for hours at a time without food. Child Protective Services took her away from him, and she said she was shocked that something terrible hadn’t happened sooner.
Scholtes denied the first-degree murder charges against him on Thursday and is still free.
His wife had asked the judge to let him go home to be with his family and “start the grieving process” with them.
She said, “This was a big mistake doesn’t show who he is.”