New details are emerging about an Arizona man whose 2-year-old daughter died after allegedly being left in a hot car for three hours.

Christopher Scholtes, 38, will be heading to trial later this month in Pima County on charges of first-degree murder and intentional child abuse following the fatal incident, which occurred on July 9, 2024.

The father-of-three allegedly left his youngest child in the car after running errands, and then forgot about her while he sat inside playing video games, according to multiple court documents previously filed in the case and viewed by PEOPLE.

A new court filing claims that Scholtes also allegedly searched for pornography on his PlayStation during that time.

That information comes from a motion for admissibility filed by prosecutors and obtained by PEOPLE.

The prosecution hoped to introduce evidence of Scholtes’ alleged pornography search during his upcoming murder trial, but that request has been denied by Judge Kimberly Ortiz.

Judge Ortiz wrote in her order that “the State is precluded from any eliciting testimony in its case in chief regarding the Defendant looking for pornography on the PlayStation before [his daughter’s] body is discovered.”

Prosecutors were also told that any witnesses they call to testify during the trial are “precluded from mentioning Defendant’s two-minute search for pornography on the Playstation on July 9, 2024.”

Earlier this year, the judge ruled that Scholtes could travel to Hawaii with his wife and two surviving daughters ahead of his trial.

That ruling came just days after Scholtes rejected a plea deal in the case and entered a not guilty plea to both charges.

Scholtes allegedly admitted to leaving his daughter in the car when Marana police arrived at his home, after his wife discovered the child’s lifeless body inside the vehicle.

She had been in the car for more than three hours by that time, according to the criminal complaint, and the temperature inside the vehicle was 109 degrees.

Scholtes allegedly told the responding officers that after running errands that day, he left his daughter in the car with the air conditioning on because she was asleep in her car seat. He allegedly said he went inside to put away groceries.

He then allegedly said that he became distracted and forgot about his daughter, according to the complaint.

The complaint also alleged that Scholtes said he was aware that the car engine in his vehicle turns off after 30 minutes, at which point there would be no air conditioning.

Investigators also alleged that the two surviving daughters, who were 6 and 9 at the time, said in interviews that their father had previously left them alone in the car on other occasions.

The Arizona sun had begun its cruel ascent, spreading light like molten gold across a quiet suburban street. By mid-morning, the asphalt shimmered, the air trembled, and the desert’s breath could have scorched glass. Inside a modest stucco house at the edge of Tucson, a man named Caleb Shore sat in front of a glowing television, his fingers wrapped around a game controller, lost inside a digital world. Outside, the silence was so thick it felt like time itself was holding its breath.

Caleb was thirty-eight, a father of three, and the sort of man neighbors described as ordinary in every way—the kind who waved when he took the trash out and helped push stalled cars in summer heat. But that July morning, ordinary would twist into something impossible to forget.

The living room smelled faintly of coffee and plastic. Sunlight fell through half-closed blinds, striping the floor in bars of white. The air conditioner hummed, struggling against the desert heat. Caleb’s eyes flicked between the screen and his phone. He moved like someone trying to drown out the noise inside his own mind. He had errands behind him, groceries stacked by the fridge, and a fragile calm in the air—the kind that comes just before everything breaks.

Down the hall, two little girls played in their shared bedroom, their laughter drifting like music from another world. They were used to the gentle chaos of mornings: cereal bowls, cartoons, the sound of their father’s game console clicking. Nothing about the day seemed unusual, and yet every second was quietly leading toward a disaster that would mark them forever.

Outside, parked in the driveway under a pale blue sky, Caleb’s silver SUV sat still, its engine off, its windows reflecting the blinding sun. Inside that vehicle, a secret was building, sealed by glass and ignorance.

Caleb’s youngest child, a two-year-old named Lila, had fallen asleep on the drive home from the grocery store. It was the kind of sleep parents hesitate to disturb—soft, perfect, full of trust. He had meant to bring her in after unpacking the bags. Just a few minutes, he told himself. Just until the milk was in the fridge. But minutes in the desert can become monsters.

He placed the last box of cereal on the counter, wiped his forehead, and turned toward the living room. The console lit up like a portal to escape. He sat down, controller in hand, the hum of the air conditioner masking the whisper of responsibility tugging at him from outside.

Fifteen minutes.
That was all he thought he’d spend there—just enough time for one quick match. But the digital battle turned into another, then another. Notifications flashed on his phone, messages from friends, videos, trivial chatter. He opened a browser. A small corner of curiosity lured him away from guilt and into the endless, meaningless scroll that so easily swallows hours.

Meanwhile, the Arizona sun climbed higher. Inside the parked SUV, the air thickened, then burned. The temperature would rise past 100 °F, a figure that looked harmless on a screen but felt like punishment in real life. Lila shifted in her seat, her small chest rising and falling, the air turning thin around her.

Back in the house, Caleb laughed once at something that happened on the screen, unaware that the soundtrack of his life was about to cut.

When noon came, the desert roared. Shadows vanished. The smell of hot rubber and dust filled the street. The SUV shimmered like a mirage.

Inside the home, the two older sisters grew restless. They asked for lunch. Caleb muted his game, glanced at the clock, and felt that jolt—something missing, a thread he couldn’t name. It was the moment when the human mind tries to rewrite its own timeline, searching for the last memory that makes sense.

He walked toward the kitchen. Groceries done, girls fine. But a space in his mind suddenly opened like a door: the sound of a baby sighing in the car seat, the weight of a diaper bag still by the front door, the ghost of a lullaby from the drive home.

Caleb froze. The controller slipped from his hand and hit the tile with a dull crack.

The next sound he heard wasn’t in the house—it was in his chest.

He ran outside barefoot, sunlight stabbing his eyes. The world felt slow, like running through water. The SUV sat there, silent, innocent in appearance, cruel in truth. He yanked the handle. The air that burst out felt like fire.

“Lila!”

The name tore through him, through the street, through everything that used to be his life.

He pulled her out, skin hot against his arms, lips pale, hair damp with sweat. The neighbors heard the scream before they saw the scene. Someone called 911. Someone else brought water. Time turned shapeless.

When paramedics arrived, Caleb was on his knees, rocking, whispering apologies into the desert wind. His two daughters stood on the porch, eyes wide, holding each other’s hands. A toy fell from one of their fingers and rolled down the steps, landing beside their father’s foot.

The sirens came too late.

By the time the officers arrived, the world had changed. The air smelled of heat and grief. Caleb’s wife, Marisa, arrived minutes later, stepping out of her car to find chaos: flashing lights, neighbors gathering, her husband collapsing. She didn’t scream right away. She just looked at the open SUV door, then at the small form on the driveway, and something inside her shattered quietly.

An officer guided her away as medics worked. She asked the same question over and over, her voice breaking on each syllable: “How long? How long?”

No one answered.

That night, the temperature finally dropped, but the house remained suffocating. The toys were still on the floor. The grocery bags still sat half-unpacked. Marisa sat at the kitchen table, staring at nothing, while Caleb was questioned in the next room.

Detectives described him as dazed, incoherent, a man in free fall. He kept repeating the same words: I thought she was asleep. I thought the car was still running.

He didn’t mention the game console or the browser tabs open on the screen. But investigators would later piece together the hours with brutal precision. They would find logs—digital footprints showing moments of distraction stacked like dominoes leading to tragedy.

In those records lay the quiet truth of the modern age: the way attention fractures, the way small choices become catastrophic.

By dawn, the story had already started to leak. A headline on a local news site read, “Toddler Dies in Hot Car—Father Claims It Was a Mistake.” Comments filled with rage and pity. Photos from social media painted a picture of a happy family, smiling in sunlight.

What no one saw were the minutes between guilt and silence, between the last moment of normalcy and the first breath of regret.

Marisa couldn’t look at him. The neighbors wouldn’t speak to him. The house itself seemed to hum with judgment.

As the investigation deepened, whispers began to swirl—about his negligence, about digital distractions, about what he might have been doing when the clock ran out on his daughter’s life. None of it could undo the truth already written in heat and time.

The tragedy of Lila Shore had only just begun to unfold.

And while the headlines would soon feed on the details—police reports, courtroom motions, and speculation about morality—the real story lived in the quiet moments after everything stopped. In the hum of the air conditioner that kept running long after the game ended. In the grocery bag still sitting by the door. In the two little girls who would never again ask to play in the sun.

The desert, as it always did, swallowed the sound and moved on. But the silence left behind had a weight that no one in that neighborhood would ever forget.

The desert dawn came without mercy. Pale light spilled over the quiet neighborhood, washing the world in a color that felt almost sterile. The police tape still fluttered across the driveway like a thin yellow wound. Inside, the house smelled of cold coffee and fear.

Caleb sat at the kitchen table, elbows on his knees, the hum of the refrigerator louder than his breathing. His shirt was still damp from the day before, salt streaks on the fabric like scars. Across from him, a detective flipped through a notebook. Every question felt like a needle.

“Tell me again what time you came home.”

Caleb’s voice cracked. “Around ten. Maybe ten-fifteen.”

“And your daughter?”

“She fell asleep in the car. I— I thought I’d wake her after I finished putting the groceries away.”

The detective nodded without sympathy. Outside, the sound of camera shutters popped as reporters began to gather. The story had broken overnight, and the world wanted a villain.

Grief had become a public spectacle.

Marisa sat in the living room, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of her daughter’s shampoo. Her sister held her hand, whispering words that vanished before reaching the air. The two older girls slept upstairs, unaware that every headline in Arizona now carried their last name.

By noon, a storm of reporters filled the street. Satellite trucks lined the curb, their antennas cutting the sky. The local news anchor’s voice floated through the open window: “Police say the father claims it was an accident…”

Marisa closed her eyes. She wanted silence. She wanted yesterday back.

Meanwhile, inside the precinct, investigators began dissecting Caleb’s life. They collected phone records, console logs, browser histories—digital fingerprints of distraction. A young officer stared at the timestamps on the screen and shook his head. “He was online for hours,” he murmured.

The lead detective sighed. “People always think they can multitask through guilt.”

Technology had become the quiet accomplice.

Caleb’s lawyer, a thin man with weary eyes, arrived mid-afternoon. He sat across from his client and spoke in a calm, measured tone. “You need to stop apologizing, Caleb. Every word you say becomes evidence.”

Caleb didn’t respond. His mind replayed one image: Lila’s face in the rearview mirror that morning, cheeks flushed with sleep, her tiny hand clutching a stuffed rabbit. That memory looped like a curse, burning brighter each time.

In another room, officers cataloged evidence: a grocery receipt, a melted juice box, a pink car seat still buckled. Every object became a symbol of what was lost.

That night, Marisa agreed to see him. They sat in the visiting room, separated by glass, phones pressed to their ears. Her eyes were red but steady.

“Why, Caleb?” she asked softly.

He opened his mouth but found no sound. Words were too small for the hole inside him.

“I don’t know,” he finally whispered. “I thought she was safe. I thought I’d remember.”

Her voice cracked. “You were supposed to.”

For a long moment they just stared at each other, two people on opposite sides of something invisible and endless.

Outside, the desert cooled. Crickets returned to the silence.

Days turned into weeks. The autopsy confirmed what everyone already knew: heatstroke, prolonged exposure, fatal neglect. The district attorney announced charges of first-degree child endangerment resulting in death, a phrase that sounded clinical, almost sterile compared to the weight it carried.

Marisa moved with her daughters into her sister’s house. Reporters camped outside, waiting for a glimpse of tragedy they could package into another headline. The girls clung to each other, whispering that maybe their father would come home soon.

Caleb, sitting in a county cell, wrote letters he never sent. In them, he confessed not to murder but to forgetfulness. To the tiny distractions that added up to ruin. He wrote about time—how it bends, how it disappears, how it can destroy without warning.

One letter ended with a single line:
“A moment isn’t small when it’s the last one you ever get.”

His lawyer filed motions, arguing that it was a terrible accident, not intent. The prosecution painted him as reckless, detached, more interested in screens than in the life behind him. Both versions of the man seemed true and false at once.

When Marisa testified before the grand jury, her voice barely carried. “He loved his kids,” she said. “He wasn’t a monster. He just… forgot.”

The jurors shifted uncomfortably. Love and guilt often share the same face.

Outside the courthouse, cameras flashed. The story had grown beyond Tucson now—picked up by national outlets, transformed into cautionary tales about parenting in the digital age. Talk shows debated responsibility, psychologists analyzed human attention spans, and strangers online called Caleb everything from heartless to broken.

Through it all, Marisa tried to keep the girls from seeing the headlines. At night she told them that their father was away working, that the stars could still hear prayers. Then she’d step into the hallway and cry quietly, the sound swallowed by the hum of an old air conditioner.

The summer stretched on. Each day felt like living inside a wound that refused to close.

By September, the investigation was complete. Caleb was released on bond, awaiting trial. He returned to a rented apartment miles from his old home, where the walls were bare and the silence was his only company. He walked at night to avoid the stares. He learned how quickly sympathy could turn into accusation.

One evening, as the sun bled orange over the desert, he stood on his balcony and whispered his daughter’s name. The wind carried it away, soft as dust.

He thought about the day it happened, how he’d believed he could control time, how every choice had felt harmless until it wasn’t.

Now, every sound reminded him of that day—the click of a game controller, the whir of an engine shutting off, the high note of a child’s laugh.

Guilt had no off switch.

Meanwhile, prosecutors prepared their case. Detectives compiled timelines, psychologists studied his mental state, experts prepared to testify about the dangers of heat and distraction. The trial was set for winter.

In the months leading up to it, the city seemed divided. Some saw Caleb as a warning, others as a man who had already punished himself enough. Editorials argued that modern life had become a trap of divided attention—that tragedy now came not from cruelty, but from forgetfulness.

For Marisa, none of that mattered. Her world had shrunk to the size of memory. She avoided the grocery store where they used to shop. She couldn’t stand the sight of car seats in parking lots. She started painting at night—abstract shapes, mostly blue, like water she could drown her thoughts in.

One night, she found one of Caleb’s old letters in a box the police had returned. It was written on notebook paper, the edges smudged. At the bottom he had drawn a small sun, next to the words:
“If I could trade places with her, I would.”

Marisa pressed the page to her chest and wept until dawn.

The next morning, she called his lawyer. “Tell him,” she said quietly, “that I’ll testify. I’ll tell them he wasn’t evil. Just lost.”

And with that, the story moved toward the courtroom—toward judgment, truth, and whatever fragile redemption might still exist beyond the reach of the Arizona sun.

Winter crept over the desert in soft disguise. The mornings were colder now, the horizon painted in faded gold instead of fire. On the courthouse steps, cameras waited like vultures. Inside, fluorescent lights hummed, and the air carried that sterile chill of bureaucracy mixed with fear.

Caleb walked into the courtroom wearing a plain gray suit. His hair had grown uneven, his face pale from months of silence. The room tilted with whispers as he took his seat beside his attorney. Across the aisle sat Marisa, hands clasped tight, a single silver ring twisting between her fingers.

The judge’s gavel struck once. The sound felt final.

Prosecutors opened with precision, their words sharp and polished. They spoke of negligence, distraction, digital obsession. They painted the timeline like a crime scene made of minutes and choices. A screen glowed with images—maps, temperature charts, phone logs. Each detail carved deeper into the air.

When they mentioned Lila’s name, the room shifted; every person seemed to hold their breath.

Caleb kept his eyes low. Every sentence felt like glass against his skin. He wanted to scream that he already knew—that he relived it every night—but guilt had no defense strong enough to sway the logic of law.

Then came the witnesses. Neighbors. Officers. Experts. Each described fragments of that day: the heat, the car, the silence. One paramedic paused, voice trembling. “We tried everything,” she said softly. “But the heat wins fast out here.”

Marisa closed her eyes.

When it was the defense’s turn, Caleb’s lawyer stood with calm restraint. “This was not cruelty,” he began. “It was a catastrophe born of distraction—a reminder that in our world, attention is the most fragile currency.”

He spoke about love, about routine, about how quickly the human brain can falter. He described Caleb as a father who cooked breakfast, read bedtime stories, and built pillow forts. “One lapse,” he said, “does not erase a lifetime of care.”

But the prosecution countered with a single phrase that echoed through the room:
“One lapse can end a lifetime.”

When Caleb finally took the stand, the courtroom seemed to shrink. He gripped the edge of the wooden podium like a man steadying himself against a storm.

“I can’t undo it,” he said. His voice was quiet but steady. “Every morning I wake up and hear her laugh, and then I remember she’s gone. I thought I could control time. I thought I could remember. I was wrong.”

He paused, his eyes finding Marisa’s across the room. “I failed her. I failed all of them.”

For a moment, even the court reporter’s fingers stopped moving.

The trial stretched for days that felt like months. Reporters filed stories full of contrast—some calling him heartless, others haunted. Outside, the public argued as if judgment were entertainment. Inside, the people who mattered simply endured.

When the verdict came, the world seemed to slow.

The judge’s voice was firm but not cruel. “This court finds the defendant guilty of negligent homicide, not murder.”

The words hung in the air—half-condemnation, half-mercy. Caleb closed his eyes. Marisa’s tears came quietly, her shoulders shaking as relief and sorrow collided inside her.

The sentence: seven years, with the possibility of parole after five.

There was no cheering, no outrage. Just the low murmur of reality settling into place.

Later, in the small holding room behind the courtroom, Marisa asked to see him. The guard hesitated, then allowed it. They stood separated by a table, the fluorescent light humming overhead.

“I told the truth,” she said. “You weren’t evil.”

He nodded, eyes red. “I don’t deserve forgiveness.”

“Maybe not yet,” she whispered. “But our girls need to believe people can come back from mistakes.”

He wanted to hold her, but the distance between them was measured in something deeper than space. Still, her words pierced through the fog of guilt like sunlight through clouds.

That night, as he lay in a narrow cell, Caleb thought about redemption—not as something you earn, but as something you build one breath at a time. He remembered the sound of Lila’s laugh, the warmth of her hand. He whispered her name into the darkness.

“I’ll spend the rest of my life remembering.”

Years passed in the slow rhythm of routine. Caleb became a quiet figure inside the prison library, helping others learn to read, writing letters for men who had forgotten their own words. He kept a small drawing pinned above his bunk—three stick figures holding hands beneath a sun. It was drawn by his daughters the year before the tragedy.

Each sunrise he saw through the barred window reminded him of the desert’s indifference and the human heart’s fragile capacity to heal.

When parole finally came, he walked out into the same blinding Arizona light. The world looked smaller, quieter. Marisa waited near the gate, her hair touched with gray, her daughters—now teenagers—standing behind her.

No one spoke for a long time. Then one of the girls stepped forward and hugged him. The embrace was awkward, trembling, but real.

Caleb felt something in his chest unlock—a breath he hadn’t taken in years.

Later, as they drove through the desert, he looked out at the horizon where sky met sand. The past would never vanish, but it no longer owned him entirely.

Marisa broke the silence. “She’d want us to keep living,” she said.

He nodded. “Then we will.”

The sun dipped low, the light softer now, forgiving. In its fading glow, their shadows stretched together across the highway, fragile and human and whole again for a moment.

Grief had taught them the cost of forgetting. Love would teach them how to remember.

And somewhere in the quiet desert evening, where wind carried echoes of laughter and loss, the story of Caleb Shore ended—not with redemption written in headlines, but with the fragile grace of ordinary people learning how to begin again.