Saylor Hayes parents, 70 and 31, arrested after 5-year-old is found dead as mom shares little angel tribute
The Virginia parents of a 5-year-old non-verbal girl who was found dead in a South Carolina waterway have been arrested – hours after the child’s mom labeled her daughter “mommy’s little angel” in an online tribute.John Herb Hayes III, 70, and his wife Geordyn Nichole Hayes, 31, were captured in Tennessee on Tuesday and face charges of unlawfully placing a child at risk/wilfully abandoning a child in connection with the death of Saylor Hayes, Georgetown County Sheriff’s said.Saylor was found dead in a waterway close to their Pawleys Island rental home at around 9:45 a.m.Monday, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and white lanyard, following an “intensive search involving hundreds of people and multiple agencies,” authorities said.The girl, who was supposed to wear a Project Lifesaver transmitter because she tended to wander off, was not wearing the device when she walked away from the property during the family’s vacation.Her parents have been accused of putting Saylor “at an unreasonable risk of harm affecting her life and safety by failing to provide supervision and safeguards appropriate for a severely nonverbal, autistic, five-year-old child with a known affinity to water and a history of elopement,” the arrest affidavit states.Saylor had been wearing a monitoring device since 2024, but the device had been removed before the family left Virginia, the document states.
It’s unclear who removed the tracker or when it was removed. Her parents have also been accused of complicating the search effort. “[They] encouraged search efforts to be directed toward the use of tracking technology, despite knowing that the child was not wearing the monitoring device,” police said.“[They] further directed search efforts away from the nearby body of water.” Her parents, who have been married for five years, will return to Georgetown County once extradition proceedings have been completed.It’s not clear when they fled to Tennessee.Georgetown Cou...