A father from Houston has been arrested and charged with child abandonment on Friday (November 17) after his 6-year-old daughter strangled her 1-year-old brother with a seatbelt.

According to ABC 13, 26-year-old Adrian Dreshaun Middleton allegedly left the two kids in a car to go thrift shopping for an hour and 40 minutes. He was arrested last week but wasn’t in police custody as of Monday. The tragic incident happened on May 20.

Middleton told authorities he gave the young children water and snacks, turned on the air conditioning, and played a movie before leaving them alone in the vehicle for only “30 to 45 minutes.” Surveillance cameras, however, tell a different story as they showed the father was gone between 10:45 a.m. and 12:15 p.m.

Middleton says he checked on the children through a store window and thought they were fine. Footage shows that did not occur. He then claimed that when he returned to the Harris County parking lot to load his purchased goods into the trunk his daughter was crying and wanted to use the bathroom.

When he asked where the young girl’s brother was, she told him she “did something bad.” Middleton subsequently discovered the infant with a seat belt wrapped around his neck. He removed the seat belt and attempted to perform CPR on the toddler until medical help arrived.

Adrian Middleton Jr. was later pronounced dead at Texas Children’s Hospital. According to the six-year-old, she was playing with her younger brother inside the car and when she stopped he began crying. That’s when she became angry and tightened the seat belt around his neck.

Prosecutors claim Middleton put his son at “an unreasonable risk of harm, namely, and a reasonable person would have believed that such circumstances would place the Complainant in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, physical impairment and mental impairment.”

Adrian Middleton was a former defensive lineman for Prairie View A&M University. He was scheduled to appear in court on Monday.