2 Deaths, 2 Outcomes in Heated Car Cases

Nine-month-old Veronika Balta grew up around the ponies.

Her father, Antonio, was a thoroughbred horse groomer who followed the racing circuit from New York to Kentucky to Florida. Her mother, Michelle Bashford, waited tables at the various track clubhouses.

The couple couldn't afford day care, so Balta would park Veronika's stroller in the stables while he worked on the horses. Balta would talk to his little "mami" _ short for mami chula, Spanish for "pretty mommy" _ while he washed and brushed the horses.

"I had to be at work at 4 in the morning to 11 or 12 in the afternoon," the 30-year-old Peruvian native says in soft-spoken, heavily accented English. "Basically it was me and her relationship, because the mother used to work all day, 9 in the morning to 7. So I got her by myself all these hours."

On March 14, 2004, the couple were packing up to return to upstate New York. Bashford was finishing up her last shift at Gulfstream Park north of Miami; Balta decided to try and pick up a little more spending money at the betting windows.

Veronika cried around large crowds, so Balta says he left her in the car. He cracked the windows just a hair, he says, because he was afraid someone might take her.

The first two times Balta left the air-conditioned betting parlor to check on Veronika, she was playing happily with a stuffed toy that he'd won for her in a Kentucky claw machine _ a rabbit dressed in a striped prison uniform. But then he got caught up in the races, and before he knew it, about 45 minutes had gone by.

When he found Veronika, she was limp, her eyes rolled back into her head.

"I tried to wake her up but when I carry her like this," he says, gesturing as if holding a baby over his right shoulder, "... milk came out of her mouth."

The temperature was mild when Balta got to the track that day. He says he had no idea the car could heat up that quickly.

At trial, a psychologist testified that Balta's IQ was just 74. Balta's defense attorney called him "borderline retarded."

Balta pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and threw himself on the mercy of the court. Circuit Judge Ilona Holmes had none.