The morning after the padlocking, around 8am when the family went to take Ame out of the box, she wasn't moving, she wasn't breathing. It was about half an hour later, someone decided to call 911.

Officer Albert Salaiz had joined the phoenix police department in 2000 after a long career in the Air Force, flying politicians to europe. He was working patrol again, after a stint on a squad that took on violent crime syndicates.

That morning, July 12,2011, Salaiz left the Estrella mountain precinct to tell county prosecutors what he knew about a high profile home invasion involving rival drug gangs, a big shootout and gangsters posing as SWAT teams and that was when the injured child call came.

Salaiz was a couple of blocks away, so he went

When he got there, Salaiz instantly recognized the house, he'd been there a week or two earlier to respond to reports of kids throwing rocks.

This time, he sprinted from his patrol car to the front door and just when he reached it, the door suddenly swung open and a rottweiler charged him, he thought the dog would surely bite him and a woman shouted:

"Don't shoot the dog!"

The dog finally backed down though.

Salaiz's adrenaline was pumping, it didn't strike him until later; the woman was more concerned about the dog than the hurt child he was there to help. He vaulted a wall and rounded a corner and that's when he saw her.

A girl was on a carpet in the garage, curled up with her legs near her chest and then it hit him, he knew this girl. He'd seen her on the rock throwing call and he already knew she was dead.

You just know

But what officer Salaiz didn't know that morning was that Ame Deal's life ended before it began, she never was granted any real chance to live.

Ame Deal was found dead on July 12,2011, two weeks shy of her eleventh birthday. She suffocated in a padlocked storage box, soaked in her own urine and sweat.

Other police officers and firefighters arrived to a house that reeked of urine, used tampons and cockroaches littered the floors. Salaiz doesn't remember the filth and stench, only what he saw first.

Ame lay on a blue carpet next to a wet urine stain, her lips were the colour of the carpet, her skin was starting to discolour, her body was twisted unnaturally in the position of a kid play-acting dead

The difference though, Ame wasn't acting.

She was dead.

And she was treated worse than any junkyard mongrel. Her body was already stiffening, it looked like one of those body casts of ancient Pompeii residents burned in ash. It looked like she'd been trying to push the lid off her plastic coffin. John Allen stood above Ame as a woman tried CPR.

Somebody was talking about a hide and seek game gone awry. The girl had locked herself in the box.

Herself

Not much later, Salaiz's supervisor came by and asked him what happened

"They fucking killed her!" Salaiz exclaimed with a pissed off tone

"You can't be saying that, you don't know that for a fact" His supervisor said

Salaiz went to get an initial statement from John Allen, who sat on a swing, acting like nothing happened.

Allen said he and his wife went to bed at 1am as Ame, a 12 year old and his 3 year old daughter played hide and seek and the next morning they found Ame in the box, dead. The story struck Salaiz as odd. A 3 year old playing hide and seek at 1am?

Not likely.

Allen's demeanor too, there was no emotion from him.

Officer Salaiz went to hear the 12 year old's story, she was a few doors down the street. As he walked towards it, Cynthia Stoltzmann walked towards him

"Yeah, they found Ame dead" She said and she walks past him

He didn't think at the time: how could she know that Ame was dead, minutes after paramedics declared it?

The 12 year old had the look of a scolded child who didn't want to be there, and really didn't want to talk. She stood, stiff, never looking Salaiz in the eye as he asked her what happened. She told the same story John told, except for one detail.

She went to bed at 9

The Maricopa County Medical Examiner's office determined that Ame died of asphyxiation, after suffering heat exhaustion and dehydration. Forensic investigators with the officer ruled it a homicide. But long before those results, on the morning Ame died, John Allen wrote out his thoughts in a spiral notebook.

"Ame passed away in box. They (the kids) were playing hide and seek. We believe she fell asleep and suffocated" He wrote.

And that's the story everybody in the house, even the kids, told the police. The 3 year old loved to lock things as a prank and run away giggling, she must have trapped Ame in the box by accident but the police were having none of it.

Suspicions turned to arrest and a little over a week later, Sammantha was arrested. When detectives asked John what he thought about his wife's arrest, he replied;

"It should have been me"

John continued to admit nothing until detectives told them they already had the evidence in their pockets. John's story would change and change and change over again, he was covering for Sammantha.

"There was no emotion from him or the grandma either, that's what bothered me, there was no emotion" Salaiz had said "I'd never seen anything like that" he added.

He has been a cop for eleven years!

During breaks in the questioning, the couple conferred alone in an interview room. They didn't know police watched and listened.

Police watched, listened and recorded for the benefit of a future jury when the Allens learned their contrivance about hide and seek had crumbled.

"We should have come up with something very solid, all together as a family, and nobody would have to take the fall" John told his wife

Detectives scribbled it down

Bit by bit, John relented, he admitted to clamping Ame in the box. Under questioning, he confessed he had jostled her about in it, he told detectives after ten or so confinements that Ame would emerge out of the box sweaty, but "not fainting, not out of it"

"That indicated he knew there was no air and the box was inherently dangerous" Prosecutor Gallagher later concluded.

Detectives asked John where the padlock went and after deflecting, he finally told them he hid it.

"I just didn't get up" John later told police interrogators

He could have saved Ame's life, but it meant so little to him.

"Her world was small and very isolated and it was dominated by her family" Said her defense attorney, John curry "that's all she knew, that's all she knew"

The Allens had turned Ame's prison into her tomb.

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