On the morning of the day she died, a distraught Nicole Clark called her father 19 times, starting at 6:35 a.m.

At 8:11 a.m., the crying 9-year-old girl left a voicemail asking her father to call her. A few minutes later, she sent a text: “CALL ME IF YOU CAN AND IF YOU CAN’T ANSWER ME AND TEXT ME TOO.”

Keith Clark, in Taiwan on a business trip, was asleep when the calls and texts came in.

At 10:30 p.m. Nov. 17, Nicole Clark and her mother, Patrice Clark, were found dead in the back seat of a gold Jeep Cherokee in their fume-filled garage at 1524 Harvest Drive in Lafayette.

The Boulder County Coroner’s Office earlier this week ruled the cause of death to be carbon monoxide poisoning. Patrice Clark was extremely intoxicated. But Coroner Tom Faure said it was not possible to determine whether the deaths were accidental or intentional.

The final report from the Lafayette Police Department’s own investigation, released Wednesday afternoon, paints a painful portrait of the mother’s and daughter’s last hours but comes no closer to answering the ultimate question.

According to the police report, when Lafayette police arrived at Patrice Clark’s home, they found the lights on and several televisions blaring, but no one answered the door.

The officers were there because her boss, Leah Benner, had called to say she was very worried because Patrice Clark hadn’t shown up to work and hadn’t answered her phone all day. The night before, Benner had driven Patrice and Nicole Clark home from a bar, where they had been celebrating a co-worker’s birthday, and stopped at a liquor store at Patrice Clark’s request.

Three officers responded because Lafayette police had frequent contact with Patrice Clark and had a note on her address that recommended at least a two-officer response.

Inside the garage, the smell of exhaust was overwhelming, but the car wasn’t running. Police would later determine the engine had shut off because of the lack of oxygen in the garage. The Jeep’s rear doors were open.

The legs of an adult woman, later determined to be Patrice Clark, extended from the rear driver’s side door. A crumpled McDonald’s bag was on the garage floor nearby. A girl’s legs extended from the rear passenger side door.

Patrice Clark was lying on the rear driver’s-side seat. On the floor was a half-empty bottle of vodka. Beneath her body were worksheets from an alcoholism class.

Nicole Clark was lying on the floor of the rear passenger side, her head on the center console, roughly even with her mother’s waist.

The DVD screen was down. “Napoleon Dynamite” was in the DVD player.

Keith Clark later told investigators it was Patrice Clark’s favorite movie.

Keith Clark rushed back from Taiwan when he learned of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths. He first met with police at 5 p.m. Nov. 18.

When told of what police knew so far, he told the detective, “It would be like Patrice to go out that way,” according to the report. But he said his wife would never intentionally harm their daughter and was not suicidal herself.

Keith Clark said his daughter might have been trying to help her mother when she succumbed to the fumes.

In a longer interview the next day, Keith Clark said he separated from his wife two years ago over her alcoholism. They had gone on a cruise, but she got very drunk and became physically abusive toward him. When they got home, he made her move out.

But he paid her rent on the Lafayette home and put a few hundred dollars a week into an account for her. Patrice Clark didn’t have a job until a few weeks before her death. Nicole was allowed to stay at the home one night a week, usually Tuesday.

Keith Clark said Patrice Clark would avoid alcohol for days, then go on a binge.

The arrangement started to change when Patrice Clark was arrested for driving under the influence by Erie police in September. She had a blood-alcohol level of 0.27. Her driver’s license was revoked, and she was sentenced to a 20-day work-release sentence that was supposed to start Nov. 20.

Keith Clark told his wife he wasn’t going to pay for her DUI, and she needed to get a job.

But rather than being upset, Keith Clark said, Patrice Clark was excited about the job at Home Base Delivery, which allowed to her to exercise and spend time outside as she delivered advertising fliers.

She made arrangements for a co-worker to drive her back and forth to work while her license was revoked and for a friend to drive her daughter back and forth to Heatherwood Elementary School. Nicole was to stay with her mother while Keith Clark was in Asia for a week.

Shanna Stapleton, the friend who was driving Nicole to school, told police she talked to Patrice Clark the day before she died. The two had stopped talking over Patrice Clark’s alcoholism, but they re-established their friendship when Patrice Clark started attending Alcoholics Anonymous and going to church.

Stapleton told police that Patrice Clark considered the DUI a “wake-up call” and had a “good attitude” about the situation.

But a co-worker who drank with Patrice Clark outside of work several times in the weeks before her death told police she got “totally messed up.”

Stapleton said Patrice Clark wanted to spend time with Nicole before reporting for work release. When Ryan Smith, Stapleton’s husband, stopped by the Harvest Drive house at 7:30 a.m. Nov. 17 to pick up Nicole for school, he found a note that said, “Not home right now … love you … Patrice.” The couple told police they assumed Patrice had decided to keep Nicole home that day and didn’t worry about it.

Debit card records show Patrice Clark bought breakfast burritos at McDonald’s at 9:43 that morning. A receipt found in the garage shows she was at Karz Drive-In restaurant at 9:30 a.m. Surveillance video from Karz shows a gold Jeep Cherokee going through the drive-through. The driver is Patrice Clark, and a girl with Nicole’s build is in the passenger seat.

It was the last trace of the pair before they were found by police more than 12 hours later, their bodies already stiff from rigor mortis.

In the dining room of the clean and orderly home, police found Nicole’s school bag and coat, ready to go.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Erica Meltzer at 303-473-1355 or meltzere@dailycamera.com.