Police video: Mother questioned about leaving toddler in hot SUV

BATAVIA, OH -- The public finally heard from an Ohio mother who left her toddler locked for hours inside a hot SUV.

Authorities released a videotape Thursday recorded hours after Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby learned her 2-year-old daughter, Cecilia, had died in the stifling-hot vehicle.

?Good mothers don?t do this,? Nesselroad-Slaby told an investigator, her face flashing between panic and grief. ?I don?t know how I can go on.?

Prosecutors declined earlier this week to charge the assistant principal at a local Middle School, which sparked national interest in the story.

Attorneys for Nesselroad-Slaby said she did not typically take her youngest daughter to a baby sitter and forgot the sleeping child was still inside her car as she ran errands before work.

Surveillance video recorded at the school shows Nesselroad-Slaby retrieving boxes of doughnuts from the rear compartment of her Mercedes SUV, and the footage shows that she returned five times before moving the vehicle to a parking spot.

?So you took the doughnuts inside with the plan of going back out to drop them off at the sitter after that," a detective asked the Symmes Township woman.

?No, that's what my problem ? the plan I had when I left this morning was to get the doughnuts, was to get the doughnuts and go to the sitter?s," Nesselroad-Slaby said.

?And then go to school?" the detective asked. ?And then go to school, but that's where I messed myself up: I went straight to school, and then because," Nesselroad-Slaby said, before trailing off.

?Thinking it was too early to drop her off?" the detective asked.

?No, thinking, thinking, I had already done it," she said. ?I never go to school and then go to the sitter.?

White said negligence was not the standard in Ohio to bring a charge of child endangerment.