His truck had broken down in the Arizona desert, so, with his 5-year-old granddaughter by his side, Paul Armand Rater started walking.
But as they trudged, looking for help, the young girl started crying, Rater said in court last year - "pissing and moaning cause she got tired." Rater, then 53, found the child a shaded tree beneath which she could nap - and then he left her there, alone in the desert.
But not before arming the girl with a loaded and cocked .45-caliber handgun.
Five hours later, when a search party found the girl holding the gun, she said her grandfather told her to "shoot any bad guys" before he left, Reuters reported.
"I don't know why papa left me," the child also told sheriff's detectives.
On Wednesday, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said at a news conference that Rater was sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years probation for felony child abuse over the November 2015 incident. Rater was initially arrested on two counts of felony child abuse and one count of child endangerment, Reuters reported, but reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in March of this year.
"There still has been no satisfactory explanation for why that happened," Montgomery said at the news conference. "I can't tell you why. There's been no information developed over the course of the prosecution of the case to identify any justification, regardless of how ridiculous it might have been, as to why the defendant engaged in that conduct."
But during his first appearance in court last year, Rater made at least part of his motivation clear: he was hungry.
And thirsty.
Before Superior Court Commissioner Alysson Abe, Rater explained what happened that day.
He had taken his granddaughter out in his new truck to an isolated area of the desert, near Buckeye Hills in Maricopa County, Ariz., he said. The truck got stuck and he was unable to dig it out. He had left his phone at home. So Rater said he grabbed his granddaughter's hand and they started walking, looking for help.
When she grew tired, he said, he put her under a shade tree.
"I put down my gun because I didn't want to carry it," he told the commissioner.
Rater said that he kept walking, for miles and miles, but eventually ended right back where he started. He called for his granddaughter, he said, but never got a response.
". . . I tried to dig the truck out again. By then, I couldn't, I was so thirsty, I couldn't stand it," he said. "So I started walking to see if I could see her again, make sure she was OK. I didn't see her. I called for her. She said she was tired, so I guess she went to sleep, took a nap."
Rater started walking again, he said, and eventually stumbled upon a combination bar and feed store he had never seen before.
At that point, Rater's story began to deviate from the official report from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.
The grandfather told the commissioner he called his wife as soon as he made it inside, then sat down to order some sustenance.
"Only reason why I got something to eat was I hadn't eaten in six hours," Rater told the commissioner. "I drank two sodas and then I started drinking beer because I don't like soda, so, I was dehydrated."
But according to the Sheriff's Office, Rater showed up at the South Buckeye Equestrian Center about 5:30 p.m. that day in November and never mentioned his granddaughter, The Arizona Republic reported. Instead, he ordered a cheeseburger and drank up to four alcoholic beverages before calling his wife, the Sheriff's Office said.
"While he was looking for help, he came across multiple people and never thought he should call 911," deputies alleged in a probable-cause statement, the newspaper reported. "He said he did ask the people to look for his granddaughter because he left her in the desert."
The girl was eventually found, unharmed, by an off-duty firefighter and the child's grandmother, who alongside others had been searching the desert by ATV, when they called her name and heard a faint voice respond, according to the Republic.
Reuters reported that Rater's attorney, Robert Ditsworth, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.