A newly surfaced 911 call captured the moment an Arizona father who left his daughter to die in a hot car was found dead by suicide hours before he was scheduled to surrender to prison.
Christopher Scholtes, 38, was discovered inside the garage of his Phoenix home by a family nanny on November 5, the source material reported. The nanny found him around 5:20 a.m., moments after he deliberately gassed himself with exhaust from his Honda S2000.
“He’s in our home garage. It’s suicide, it’s suicide,” the nanny is heard saying in the 911 call. “He’s not breathing, and I can’t find a pulse.”
The nanny then told operators that smoke was billowing from the garage into the house. She described struggling to get the family to remove Scholtes’s two young daughters before the smoke reached them. “I got them up to get the girls out, but they haven’t, like, gotten the girls out – like everything is kind of chaotic,” she is heard saying in the recording.
Scholtes killed himself the same day he was due to report to prison ahead of his sentencing, where he faced up to 30 years behind bars. He had pleaded guilty a month earlier to second-degree murder for leaving his 2-year-old daughter to die in a hot car in July 2024.
Authorities said Scholtes left Parker inside the family’s Acura in the driveway of their Marana home outside Tucson on a scorching July afternoon when temperatures reached 109 degrees Fahrenheit. He claimed he had left the toddler around 12:30 p.m. For 30 minutes with the air conditioning running because he didn’t want to wake her from a nap.
Court records later revealed he left the girl in the vehicle for over three hours. He admitted knowing the car would shut off automatically within 30 minutes. Scholtes was inside watching pornography, playing video games and drinking beer while his daughter remained in the vehicle.
Parker was not rescued until her anesthesiologist mother came home around 4 p.m. Bodycam footage showed Scholtes breaking into panic while insisting he had left her outside for “no more than 30, 45 minutes,” Officers told him, “She’s very hot right now. We’re going to do everything we can.”
“‘My dad started screaming cause he walked outside and he saw that she was in the car still, her lips were purple and she wasn’t breathing,'” one of his daughters recounted, according to a police report. Parker was rushed to Banner University Medical Center but died within an hour.
The father had a known habit of leaving his children in vehicles. His older children from a previous marriage told investigators he had left them in cars when they were young. His younger daughters with Parker’s mother, Erika, reported that their father regularly left all three of them strapped in the car while he went inside.
Text messages between Scholtes and his wife confirmed the pattern. “I told you to stop leaving them in the car,” Parker’s 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.”
Medical examiner Daniel Casa noted that Scholtes had begun making suicidal statements following his daughter’s death.