MARANA, AZ (AZFamily) – Marana police released bodycam video Wednesday from the day a 2-year-old girl died after being left in a hot car.
The blurry video shows officers arriving at the home northwest of Tucson on July 9 and speaking with the girl’s father, Chris Scholtes.
He is then seen pacing around the house, touching his face and asking emergency workers for news about his daughter.
“Anything? Anything?” asked Scholtes. “This is my worst nightmare.”
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
“The air conditioning was on!” Scholtes told the officer in the video.
According to court documents, he left his daughter in the family’s Acura MDX after running some errands.
He said she was sleeping in her car seat and he didn’t want to wake her, so he left her there and went inside.
According to police, the temperature at the time of the call was 42.3 degrees Celsius.
However, investigators said the SUV had an automatic shutdown that Scholtes knew about.
He originally claimed the girl was in the Acura for about 45 minutes, but surveillance footage shows him coming home around 1 p.m. and his wife coming home around 4 p.m., at which point his wife asked him where their daughter was.
The couple found her motionless, still strapped into her car seat.
Text messages between the two reveal that his wife had previously told him not to leave the children in the car.
“I told you not to leave her in the car anymore, how many times have I told you,” the wife said in a text message.
He replied, “Baby, I’m sorry!” She then said, “We lost her, she was perfect,” and he responded with a text, “Baby, our family. How could I do this? I killed our baby, this can’t be true.”
Scholtes has two other children aged 9 and 5.
One of the defendants said Scholtes left her in the SUV at least 59 times and was distracted by a video game on his Playstation in the past month, court documents say.
Last week he pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and child abuse.
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