That night, she left the hospital with her parents and wouldn't see Eric again for a very long time. Eric Natzel left with his own parents.
Dr. John Hu of the county Medical Examiner's Office concluded that Abbey had suffocated inside the toy box (which had no breathing holes), but he found no evidence of internal injuries, bone fractures, or anything else that might have been fatal.
Courtesy of Phoenix Police Department
Jurors believed Eric Natzel stuffed his daughter in the toy box because she annoyed him while he played a video game.
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Hu observed the extensive bruising on the baby but said preliminarily that the manner of death was "undetermined," not homicide or even accidental.
The pathologist's final report wasn't completed for months because of the workload at the undermanned Medical Examiner's Office. But when Hu finally issued it in February 2006, the case against Eric Natzel moved forward.
Hu determined that someone had intentionally inflicted most of Abbey's bruises, especially those on her back, about two dozen in all.
That jibed with Detective Ballentine's theory that an irate Eric Natzel repeatedly hit his daughter after scrunching her into the toy box and then went back to his beloved video game.
Hu's conclusions and the opinions of other witnesses consulted by prosecutors persuaded the County Attorney's Office to secure a grand-jury indictment against Natzel on two counts of child abuse.
Defense attorney John Bovill III, who is from Natzel's home state of Michigan, argued that Abbey had let herself into the box and accidentally suffocated.
"It's a fairly simple case," Bovill told the jury in his closing argument. "I think it's gotten confused."
He said prosecutors had brought up the "non-fatal" bruises "to get all of you inflamed, so you will go after this guy."
If jurors did want to dwell on the bruises, Bovill maintained, they might consider that Amy Natzel inflicted them before going to work, but that the marks first appeared only around the time of Abbey's death.
"This was a terrible accidental death," Bovill said, suggesting that Detective Ballentine unfairly had Eric in his sights from the start.
"I don't know if I believe everything that [Ballentine] said," the attorney concluded.
Perhaps speaking of the detective's devastating testimony that Natzel "was calm, reserved, very easy to talk to, unemotional" during their interview at the hospital.
"He did not give any appearance of being upset about anything," testified Ballentine, who has since retired from the police department and now heads the arson unit at the Phoenix Fire Department.
In his closing argument, prosecutor Desi Rubalcaba countered that "this case is about responsibility and priorities. [Abbey] completely interrupted his game-playing, [so] he stuck her in that box, then he closed the lid and he latched it shut. He heard her crying, and he became enraged. She was stuffed in that box fighting for her life."
Rubalcaba said Natzel's intent to hurt his daughter "was left all over Abbey's body."
All three expert witnesses — two prosecution and one defense — agreed that Abbey would have been screaming from inside the toy box. Each also said, chillingly, that someone had deliberately inflicted the bruises on her back.
Frankie Grimsman, who co-prosecuted the trial with Rubalcaba, had the last word before jurors deliberated Natzel's fate.
"All he wanted to do is what he wanted to do," Grimsman said of the defendant and his obsession with playing video games.
The prosecutor also reminded jurors of testimony by Dr. Daniel Kessler, director of the Arizona Child Study Center at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.
Kessler said Abbey just wouldn't have fallen into the toy box in the contorted position in which Eric Natzel said he'd found her.
"That is the key," Grimsman said.
The prosecutor looked hard at the panel before essentially repeating what Detective Ballentine had said at the hospital on that terrible summer night in 2005:
"That box became her coffin."
Amy Natzel is living with her mother and her second-born child, Ian, and still works at the pharmacy from where she made the phone call wanting to speak with her daughter.
"This isn't going to bring Abbey back home," she said in the hallway after the trial, "but Jack [Ballentine] and the [prosecutors] wanted what was right for her. They did."
