Parker Scholtes, 2, died in July after being left in a hot car for hours in the driveway of he family's Marana home.
tucson.com
Dad's troublesome behavior preceded Marana girl's hot-car death, court records show
Christopher Scholtes admitted he had a lot of bad habits — that he was an addict who drove at high speeds with his three daughters in the car after he’d been drinking and that he let them nap inside the vehicle on blistering hot days while he played video games and watched pornography, court records show.
In text messages he exchanged with his wife, Erika Scholtes, he admitted to all these practices in the months leading up to their 2-year-old daughter’s death.
The National Weather Service recorded the high for the day at 109 degrees, and the girl’s body reached 108 degrees by the time paramedics got to the scene, according to an autopsy report that confirmed heat exposure as the cause of death.
This happened long after Erika Scholtes cautioned him over and over in texts against leaving their children in the car, court records show.
Parker was the only child in Scholtes’ care for most of the morning on July 9, as his two other daughters, ages 9 and 5, had been taken to a trampoline park by a neighbor, according to investigations conducted by the Marana Police Department.
Scholtes had been trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment and decided to drive down to their office with Parker since he was having trouble reaching the doctor by phone, investigation documents say. On his way back home from the office, he stopped at a gas station and a grocery store.
Surveillance footage from both businesses show he went in alone, meaning Parker was possibly left in the hot car both times, and that he shoplifted beer in both stores.
Security footage shows Scholtes at a convenience store on West Twin Peaks Road from 12:07 p.m. to 12:10 p.m. July 9, where he walked to the beer cooler and grabbed three cans of beer. He spent a couple of minutes in the restroom, exiting with fewer beer cans than he went in with, and left the store without paying for them. It is unknown if he consumed any beer in the bathroom.
Scholtes then drove to a grocery store on North Thornydale Road, where cameras showed him entering alone at 12:40 p.m. He spent seven minutes in the store before he went to self-checkout to pay for two jars of salsa, tortillas, tortilla chips and iceberg lettuce. The video shows him shoplifting two more cans of beer.
Finally, he pulled into their home’s driveway at 12:53 p.m., just in time to meet his two older girls arriving home from the trampoline park, even though he initially told investigators he reached home by 2:30 p.m. Upon their arrival, with Parker sleeping in the backseat, he decided to let her nap in the car, he told investigators, and he and the two girls went inside.
After this, the older girls had lunch and played quietly in the house, they told investigators, while their parents texted about a Christmas vacation.
Scholtes surfed the internet for men’s clothing at Nordstrom and for pornography from 2:02 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., the investigation document says.
Parker was finally brought out of the vehicle about 4 p.m. when Erika Scholtes, a doctor at Banner University Medical Center, came home from work and asked her husband about her daughter. The couple frantically ran to the car, brought her into the house and attempted to revive her.
Scholtes long showed a pattern of neglect as a parent, investigators were told by some of the family’s neighbors, the older two daughters of Scholtes and Erika, Christopher’s oldest daughter from an earlier marriage and her custodian.
According to statements from the two older children in the home that day, their father left them in the car on many occasions.
During separate interviews, each child talked about being left in the car until their loud shouts eventually got their dad’s attention inside of the house. One of the daughters also said her mother gets angry at her father when he does things he’s not supposed to do, “like drinking too much beer.”
“He still drinks too much beer, and he keeps leaving us in the car when my mom told him to stop doing this,” one of the girls told the interviewer. “That’s how he made my baby sister die.”
nypost.com
