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.

Parker Scholtes, their youngest of three, died after being left in a hot Acura MDX July 9 outside the family’s home in Marana.

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.

How the day unfolded

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.

Officers with the Tucson Fire Department arrived shortly after, and Parker was taken to a local hospital.

“I told you to stop leaving them in the car. How many times have I told you,” said Erika in texts to Scholtes while she was on the way to the hospital with Parker 30 minutes later. “We’ve lost her. She was perfect.”

About 5 p.m., Parker was declared deceased.

A pattern

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.”

Had they known she was in the car, both said they would have gotten her out.

In text conversations in the months leading up to the death, Erika talked about Scholtes and what she said was his alcoholism, former cocaine use and dangerous behaviors with respect to the children.

“You haven’t shown me you can stop putting the girls in danger or not treat me badly,” texted Erika on March 11. “Even yesterday, you drove home drunk with two minors. You drink to excess every time. You can never have just one. I’ve been asking for three years to cut back and it’s actually gotten worse.”

To this, Scholtes said he’d have to “find relief and happiness elsewhere” and that he would “start today.” Erika further accused him of replacing “cocaine with alcohol,” to which his response was, “at least this one is legal, right?” and “I’m a piece of shit addict and I need to get addicted to healthy things like running again.”

However, just 10 days after this conversation on March 21, Erika texted him asking why he was going “138” mph with their “baby in the car” and “alcohol in (his) system,” calling both these “shitty decisions.”

“You hate me,” responded Scholtes. “And she was sleeping, it’s fine.”

Neighbors not surprised

One neighbor told investigators she is extremely close to Scholtes and his family. She defended him, saying “he’s a wonderful father” and “you don’t know the whole story.”

But other neighbors talked about Scholtes’ parenting style as a well-known fact in the neighborhood over the many years the family has lived there.

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They cited numerous incidents over time, including the middle daughter getting out of the house and knocking on a neighbor’s home without her father knowing, one of the girls getting lost during Halloween celebrations and one, in a diaper, getting out of the house unsupervised another time. Several neighbors who spoke with police and reporters said Scholtes’ behavior was talked about on neighborhood chat groups.

“I think because of the history of him being so flippant about his children — and I mean, careless is a really good word — many of us have said things like, ‘This is devastating and not surprising,’” said one of the moms after Parker’s death.

Some neighbors said they’d never met Erika. One of the moms in the neighborhood said she’d decided very early on that her kids would never be alone with Scholtes.

In one instance, one of the girls’ teachers found a diapered child outside her door. The teacher brought the child home, assuming it was a one-time thing.

Another neighbor called police after hearing about Parker’s death to say she “really wanted it to be understood” that this was “a pattern of negligence (which) was 100% avoidable, and it was not a simple ‘Oopsie! This never happens’ kind of thing,” the investigation documents say.

Long before he was charged, even a complete stranger was concerned about the father’s behavior.

In 2019, a wellness call was made by a woman outside a local pizza restaurant who noticed Scholtes’ young children alone inside the vehicle. A police report states the caller said she had been waiting outside the vehicle for 15 minutes before she phoned police.

Although the children didn’t look in distress, she said she was concerned. Scholtes eventually was allowed to leave with his girls.

The arrest

When officers showed up at Scholtes’ house to arrest him July 12 on a charge of domestic violence second-degree murder, he dropped to his knees and said “no” over and over, bodycam footage taken by the Marana Police Department shows.

Scholtes started weeping while Erika soothed him by rubbing his back. She asked police if her husband could say “bye to our kids” and if he’d be able to attend Parker’s funeral. Finally, she hugged and kissed him goodbye, repeating the words “I love you.”

As Scholtes was escorted to the police vehicle, his mother cursed at officers, saying they had “no heart,” before storming off, the footage shows.

Scholtes was released from custody that evening after his first appearance in night court.

Speaking at her husband’s initial court appearance, Erika Scholtes conveyed a much different sentiment than she had in previous texts to her husband. She told the court their daughter’s death was just a terrible mistake, calling her husband a “pillar of the community” and begging that he be able to come grieve with the family and lay Parker to rest.

After all, she told the judge, his last arrest was 15 years ago for a DUI charge. She said she told police there had been no issues of this nature or other critical incidents involving her kids and her husband in the past.

Judge Lisa Surhio released him with no bond and allowed him to be home and have contact with his children as long as he is supervised.

By the time of his arraignment hearing, Scholtes’ second-degree murder charge had been increased to first-degree murder.

Lost custody of oldest daughter

Before his youngest three children were born, Scholtes had a daughter with an ex-partner.

The now 16-year-old girl lived with Scholtes, Erika, and the girls on and off from the time she was 8 years old until 2021, during which time Scholtes gained complete custody of her for a while.

However, Scholtes eventually lost custody, court documents show. And now, since the girl’s mother died this year, she was awarded a new guardian.

Several members of the girl’s family got in touch with prosecutors following Parker’s death. During his eldest daughter’s time living with Scholtes from 8 to 12 years old, she and the younger girls would be left in the car “all the time,” they said. But the situation would be handled by the oldest girl, they said, because she was old enough to know how to restart the vehicle.

The Department of Child Services was called on at least one occasion, and several welfare checks were conducted at the home, police records show. At one point, while living with Scholtes, the girl called police because she thought she had lost some cash and didn’t want to go home because she was afraid her father would hit her, she told detectives.

The girl also said her mother had to come pick her up from the police station at 2 a.m. once when she was 6 years old because she had slipped out of the Scholtes’ home and was found on a street corner.

Investigators’ records show the girl saying “she would frequently be slapped, thrown, have her hair pulled, have her head pushed into walls, and be picked up by her shirt or her arm.”

“I know he was very abusive towards her and I’m pretty sure a big portion of why custody got switched over was just the constant leaving her in the car, leaving her on a street corner in the middle of the night,” the girl’s temporary custodian, Lindsay Eisenberg, told the Star.

A ‘mistake on accident’

“We do (let them nap in the car) all the time,” Scholtes told officers who first arrived on the scene, later professing that this was a rare occurrence, although his daughters said otherwise in forensic interviews.

Although the girls were told to “tell the truth” by family members, they also briefed the young girls on what to say when they met with interviewers, the children said. Interview notes state relatives directed one sister to say her dad was a good dad and that it was an accident.

“This was not on purpose, how he made her die. He did it on accident, it was a mistake on accident,” one daughter told interviewers.

The other daughter living at the home told the interviewer her dad didn’t mean to kill Parker. She said, “he can just get distracted, and it’s been really hard to multi-task.”

On July 9 in texts to his wife as she rode in an ambulance with Parker, Scholtes wrote: “Detectives are coming for me. I’m going to prison. How could I do this?”