Parents Charged After Missing Five-Year-Old Daughter Found Dead in South Carolina Waterway

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, AUTHORITIES SAY A FIVE-YEAR-OLD NON-VERBAL AUTISTIC GIRL WANDERED FROM A SOUTH CAROLINA VACATION RENTAL AND WAS FOUND DEAD IN A WATERWAY WITHOUT HER REQUIRED TRACKER… AND BOTH OF HER PARENTS NOW FACE CHARGES OF UNLAWFULLY PLACING A CHILD AT RISK AND WILFULLY ABANDONING A CHILD.

The Hayes family had traveled from their home in Virginia to Pawleys Island, South Carolina, for a vacation.

Five-year-old Saylor Hayes, who was non-verbal and severely autistic, disappeared after wandering away from the family’s rental property.

At the time she vanished, the child was wearing only a bathing suit.

Saylor’s father, 70-year-old John Hayes, contacted emergency services to report his daughter missing at around 11 a.m. on Sunday.

Recorded audio of the emergency call suggested that the father was uncertain about his daughter’s exact age.

“My little, 4-year-old or 5-year-old girl who’s very autistic, just escaped,” he told emergency dispatchers, according to a transcript of the 911 call seen by WCBD.

He explained to dispatchers that “she took off” in a matter of a “split second.”

“We had her buckled in the car, and I went inside to get her juice and some more stuff and to leave. I came back out. She’s gone,” he said.

As dispatchers pressed him for further information about the child, John Hayes frantically stated, “I need to go look at the water.”

“Ma’am, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I gotta find her,” he said at another point during the conversation.

While her husband remained on the line with dispatchers, 31-year-old Geordyn Hayes could be heard screaming Saylor’s name in the background.

The Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office issued an official announcement stating that Saylor was missing at around 12:31 p.m. that Sunday.

A doomed search operation was immediately launched across the surrounding area.

Video footage obtained by Gab News later captured Saylor’s mother speaking with local volunteers who had gathered to assist in the search.

It remained unclear how far along into the search effort the newly revealed footage of the mother was recorded.

The video showed Geordyn Hayes in an apparent panic as she seemingly begged for help in finding her five-year-old daughter.

The mother explained to searchers that the girl had a tendency to wander into nearby houses.

“She would go into somebody’s house,” Hayes told volunteers assisting in the Sunday search.

Hayes told the helpers that her daughter was drawn to food and frequently sought it out.

“She loves food. She’s always going to the refrigerator. She has a habit of that.”

The mother also informed the search volunteers that she had reviewed surveillance camera recordings in an effort to locate Saylor.

Hayes told the helpers that she was unable to track her daughter’s movements on the footage.

“We looked on the camera. We didn’t see her,” a panicked Hayes said.

Hayes was filmed telling the volunteers that she hoped her daughter was merely asleep somewhere.

“I’m just praying… that she’s somewhere and she fell asleep, maybe.”

And the search for the missing girl escalated into a massive local and regional operation.

Authorities later reported that the search effort involved “hundreds of people and multiple agencies.”

Law enforcement deployed helicopters to conduct aerial searches across the region.

Saylor was supposed to be wearing a Project Lifesaver transmitter bracelet because of her tendency to wander off.

The helicopters deployed by law enforcement were equipped with technology that would have been able to detect the tracking signal from her bracelet.

But search crews across Pawleys Island were entirely unable to pick up any transmission from the child.

Investigators instead traced the transmitter signal to a vehicle parked outside the family home in Virginia.

The signal placed the device more than 300 miles away from the rental home where the family was vacationing.

Police subsequently revealed that the tracking device had been removed before the Hayes family ever departed the Old Dominion state.

It remained unclear who had taken the device off the five-year-old child.

It was also unclear precisely when the transmitter had been removed.

Law enforcement officials noted that taking the bracelet off would have required physical force.

The tracking band was designed in a manner that prevented it from being removed easily or accidentally.

“It cannot simply be unclasped or removed by the client; the band must be physically cut in order to remove the transmitter,” said Sheriff Blake Andis of Washington County, Virginia.

Then the extensive multi-agency search came to a tragic conclusion on Monday morning.

Authorities announced that Saylor was found dead at around 9:45 a.m. Monday.

The five-year-old child’s body was discovered in the water directly behind the Hayes family’s vacation rental home.

When her body was pulled from the South Carolina waterway, Saylor was not wearing the Project Lifesaver band.

Authorities have not publicly revealed Saylor’s official cause of death.

An autopsy to determine the cause of death was scheduled for Sept. 4.

Days after their daughter’s body was discovered, both parents were taken into custody.

John Hayes and Geordyn Hayes were arrested in Tennessee.

Mugshots for both the mother and father were released by the Carter County Sheriff’s Office.

Both parents now face criminal charges of unlawfully placing a child at risk/wilfully abandoning a child.

The specific allegations against them were outlined in an arrest affidavit seen by The Post.

According to the affidavit, the parents stand accused of putting the girl “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 charges are allegations and have not been proven in court.