The deadbeat Arizona dad who admitted to leaving his 2-year-old daughter to die in a sweltering car while he watched porn is dead — with his cowardly ending deemed a suicide, according to reports.
Christopher Scholtes, 38, was found dead in a Phoenix home just after 5 a.m. Wednesday, police told The Post, the same day he was due to report to prison ahead of his sentencing, where he faced up to 30 years behind bars.
“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 apparently ensued after he failed to appear for the hearing where he’d been directed to hand himself over to police, according to ABC 15, with courthouse officials apparently unaware that he’d died.
The despicable dad — who had a known habit of leaving his kids in the car — pleaded guilty in October to second-degree murder and was expected to be officially sentenced to between 20 and 30 years this month.
His death comes more than a year after his young daughter, Parker, was found dead in the driveway of their Marana home outside Tuscon on a scorching July afternoon in 2024, when the temperature soared to 109-degrees Fahrenheit.
He claimed to have left the toddler in the car around 12:30 p.m. for 30 minutes with the air conditioning on because he didn’t want to wake her from a nap.
But court records later revealed he left the little girl in the car for over three hours – and even admitted knowing the car would shut off automatically within a half-hour.
Scholtes was inside watching porn, playing video games and drinking beer while his daughter roasted to death.
That was something he apparently made a habit of doing – not just in one family, but in two.
His older kids from a previous marriage told investigators he would leave them in the car when they were kids, while his younger daughters with Parker’s mother, Erika, reported their dad regularly left all three of them strapped in the car while he went inside.
Parker’s roasting body was found when her anesthesiologist mother came home around 4 p.m., with bodycam footage from responding police showing Scholtes break into a panic while insisting he’d left her outside for “no more than 30, 45 minutes.”
“She’s very hot right now. We’re going to do everything we can,” cops told Scholtes.
Parker was declared dead within an hour after being rushed to the Banner University Medical Center – the same hospital where her own mother worked.
Scholtes became angry and defensive after learning his daughter had died.
“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.
And despite insisting to police that he’d never done something like this before, Scholtes’ own texts with his wife quickly said otherwise.
“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.”
The wife later called the daughter he’d killed “perfect” as they texted.
Despite her fury, the mother later requested Scholtes be allowed to come home after his arrest so the family could grieve together.
But all may not have been rosy at home.
One of Scholtes’ older daughters from his previous marriages sued both him and Erika in October, alleging they caused her emotional distress and detailing incidents of being left in cars going back to when she was 7 years old.
It also alleged she endured assault and battery from 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.

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