By all accounts, he was a doting dad to his year-old, twin son and daughter, setting up a bouncy castle for their first birthday party, and on mornings dressing them in their latest cute outfits while his wife made breakfast in their Rockland County split level.
Then, on Saturday, Juan Rodriguez, 39, was hauled handcuffed before a judge, charged with the babies’ hot-car deaths.
The day before, he’d forgotten to drop them off at their day care — and didn’t realize they were still in the back seat when he parked at his Bronx hospital job, he told officials, court papers reveal.
The lifeless bodies of his twins, Luna and Phoenix, registered an internal temperature of 108 degrees when their bodies were examined in their car seats, coroners found.
“I assumed I dropped them off at day care before I went to work,” he told cops at the scene, according to the criminal complaint against him.
“I blanked out!” he cried.
“My babies are dead! I killed my babies!”
Rodriguez was sobbing still Saturday night, throughout his arraignment before Bronx Criminal Court Justice Patsy Goldbourne.
A licensed social worker and military veteran, he was still wearing the same turquoise blue polo shirt he’d worn Friday, as he cared for homeless and disabled vets at his job at a VA hospital in Kingsbridge.
“He carried on with his day,” Assistant District Attorney Jaime Breslin told the judge.
“He forgot his children in the seats.”
The judge set bail at $100,000, which family members said they were prepared to post later Saturday.
“This is a tragedy of horrific proportions,” his lawyer, Joey Jackson, told the judge.
Rodriguez’s wife, Marissa — the twins’ mother — came to court with the couple’s surviving child, a four-year-old boy.
The dad had dropped the older boy off at a different day care that day, officials said.
The mom held him on her lap as she waited in a second-floor holding area for the arraignment to begin.
With her were some two-dozen family members and friends.
At one point, the mom broke into loud, hysterical sobs as she embraced a female family member.
At another point, an older, dark-haired woman with the group cried out, “Mis Nietos! Mis Nietos!” — my grandchildren, my grandchildren — as she hugged a male family member.
“Please, please, we’re hurting right now,” that male relative told The Post, declining to comment.
It was a horrific, double death — a baby brother and sister, side by side and helpless as the temperature in the parked vehicle spiked.
It was also a tragedy made inexplicable by Rodriguez’s reputation as a caring father.
How could a dad whose social media is crammed with photos of him snuggling with Luna and Phoenix — and whose neighbors universally describe as loving and attentive — have forgotten his twin treasures, all day, in the back seat of his car?
“This was just a horrible mistake,” neighbor Tony Caterino, 45, said of Rodriguez.
“That one time you make a mistake and you have to live with it for the rest of your life.”
On Friday morning, Rodriguez drove to work, as usual, from his home in New City, NY, a middle class and heavily wooded suburb an hour’s drive north of the city.
Rodriguez is a social worker at the James J. Peters Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Video shows it was 8:22 a.m. when he parked his Honda Accord in the hospital parking lot at 130 West Kingsbridge Road, police sources said.
The video next shows him returning at a minute before 4 p.m.
Rodriguez started the car, and drove north toward home — only to pull over less than 10 minutes later, while still in The Bronx, on Kingsbridge Terrace.
“I left them in the car!” he began screaming.
Witnesses called 911; arriving medics could not revive the babies and they were pronounced dead at the scene.
Family friend Temple Barros, 41, who lives with the Rodriguez’s, told The Post Rodriguez routinely took the twins to a day care in the mornings.
The twins would stay at day care throughout the day, Barros said, as Rodriguez worked his hospital job and Marissa worked as a tourism and travel sales manager at the Empire City Casino in Yonkers.
And while Barros didn’t see Rodriguez and the twins leave the house Friday, it would have been the dad, not the mother, who put them in the car, he said.
“An amazing guy,” Barros, told The Post of Rodriguez.
“He’s always been there for his kids. Always. This is just a horrible situation,” he said.
“The family isn’t doing so well,” he added.
Rodriguez was “always doing things with the kids,” Caterino, the neighbor, said.
“Always in the yard playing. They had a big camp-out last weekend, with tents in the backyard.
“He would always play catch or basketball with his older kids,” Caterino said of Rodriguez’s two sons from a prior marriage.
“I just can’t wrap my head around it,” said another neighbor, Paul Barlett, 39.
“No one here can believe it.”
Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones, Kenneth Garger, Larry Celonaand Laura Italiano
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