An Arizona father who admitted to abandoning his 2-year-old daughter in a hot car, where she died while he watched pornography, has been found dead. Reports indicate that his death has been ruled a suicide.
Christopher Scholtes, 38, was found dead inside a Phoenix home early Wednesday morning, just after 5 a.m., police said. It was the same day he was supposed to turn himself in to begin serving his sentence — one that could have seen him spend up to 30 years in prison. Scholtes allegedly had a history of locking his kids in parked cars for more than 10 years, his now-teen daughter claimed as she filed a lawsuit.
Punishing Himself
"Instead of coming in to take account for what has occurred here, we have been informed, and we have confirmed, that the father took his own life last night," Pima County Attorney Laura Conover said in a statement Wednesday.
Confusion broke out when Scholtes didn't show up for the court hearing where he was supposed to surrender to police, according to ABC 15. Court officials reportedly had no idea that he had already died.
The disgraced father — who was known for often leaving his children alone in the car — had pleaded guilty in October to second-degree murder. He was set to be formally sentenced this month, facing a prison term of 20 to 30 years.
Scholtes' death comes just over a year after his 2-year-old daughter, Parker, tragically died in the driveway of their Marana home, near Tucson, on a blistering July afternoon in 2024, when temperatures reached 109°F.
He initially told police that he had left the little girl in the car around 12:30 p.m. with the air conditioning running because he didn't want to wake her from a nap, claiming he was gone only about 30 minutes.
However, court documents later revealed the heartbreaking truth — Parker had been left inside the car for more than three hours. Scholtes even admitted he knew the vehicle's air conditioning would shut off automatically after just 30 minutes. During that time, he was reportedly inside the house drinking beer, watching pornography, and playing video games while his daughter slowly died in the heat.
Investigators later learned this wasn't an isolated incident. His older children from a previous marriage said he used to leave them in the car, too. And his younger daughters, from his relationship with Parker's mother, Erika, told authorities their father often left all three of them strapped in the car while he went inside.
Mentally Unwell
Parker's lifeless body was found by her mother, an anesthesiologist, when she returned home around 4 p.m. Police bodycam footage showed Scholtes panicking, insisting he had only left his daughter for "no more than 30 or 45 minutes."
"She's very hot right now. We're going to do everything we can," cops told Scholtes.
Parker was rushed to Banner University Medical Center — the same hospital where her mother worked — but doctors couldn't save her. She was pronounced dead within an hour of arriving.
When Scholtes was told that his daughter hadn't survived, he reportedly got angry and defensive instead of showing remorse or grief. "So I'm being treated like a murderer?" he said in police bodycam footage when cops told him he couldn't take a shower and they could no longer leave him alone.
Even though Scholtes told police he had never done anything like this before, messages between him and his wife later showed that wasn't true. "I told you to stop leaving them in the car," the mother texted him after the death. "How many times have I told you?"
"Babe, I'm sorry," he responded. "Babe, our family. How could I do this? I killed our baby, this can't be real."
In text messages exchanged after the tragedy, Parker's heartbroken mother described her little girl as "perfect." Despite her anger and devastation, she later asked that Scholtes be released after his arrest so the family could grieve together.
However, it appeared that life at home was far from peaceful. One of Scholtes' older daughters from a previous marriage filed a lawsuit in October against both him and Erika, accusing them of causing her severe emotional distress.
In the lawsuit, she described being left alone in cars as far back as age seven. She also claimed she had suffered physical abuse — including assault and battery — at the hands of her father and stepmother.
"The oldest daughter has suffered immensely from Christopher and Erika," the 17-year-old girl's guardian, Lindsay Eisenberg, told KVOA.
