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Wednesday, September 2, 2026 · UTC
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Sheriff: Missing Virginia Girl Found Dead Near South Carolina Beach

Virginia sheriff states the missing girl did not have her tracking device when she went missing.

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Agents with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources recovered Saylor Hayes's body around 9:45 a.m. on Monday in the waters near where she was last seen. [1] Sheriff Blake Andis said Saylor Hayes did not have her Project Lifesaver transmitter when she went missing after wandering from her family's rental home on Sunday. [2] Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis stated that Saylor Hayes, a 5-year-old girl from Bristol, Virginia, was enrolled in the Project Lifesaver program since June 2024. [3] John and Geordyn Hayes have both been charged with unlawfully placing a child at risk and willfully abandoning a child for their actions in the disappearance and subsequent death of their child. [4] John Herb Hayes III and Geordyn Nichole Hayes were arrested in Carter County, Tennessee, after their five-year-old daughter Saylor Hayes was found dead in the water on Monday, August 31. [5] Georgetown County Coroner Chase Ridgeway stated there were no visible signs of trauma on the body and that the cause and manner of death remain undetermined pending the autopsy. [6] An affidavit indicated that Saylor had been equipped with a monitoring device since 2024, but it was removed before leaving Virginia. [7] Geordyn Hayes stated that Saylor wandered off from a Pawleys Island-area rental home on Sunday morning, August 30. [8]
What this stands on
  1. Agents with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources recovered Saylor Hayes's body around 9:45 a.m. on Monday in the waters near where she was last seen. · WJHG
  2. Sheriff Blake Andis said Saylor Hayes did not have her Project Lifesaver transmitter when she went missing after wandering from her family's rental home on Sunday. · WJHG
  3. Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis stated that Saylor Hayes, a 5-year-old girl from Bristol, Virginia, was enrolled in the Project Lifesaver program since June 2024. · WJHG
  4. John and Geordyn Hayes have both been charged with unlawfully placing a child at risk and willfully abandoning a child for their actions in the disappearance and subsequent death of their child. · Hindustan Times
  5. John Herb Hayes III and Geordyn Nichole Hayes were arrested in Carter County, Tennessee, after their five-year-old daughter Saylor Hayes was found dead in the water on Monday, August 31. · Hindustan Times
  6. Georgetown County Coroner Chase Ridgeway stated there were no visible signs of trauma on the body and that the cause and manner of death remain undetermined pending the autopsy. · WJHG
  7. An affidavit indicated that Saylor had been equipped with a monitoring device since 2024, but it was removed before leaving Virginia. · Hindustan Times
  8. Geordyn Hayes stated that Saylor wandered off from a Pawleys Island-area rental home on Sunday morning, August 30. · Hindustan Times
We could not place any of them by their address. None is an official body: that part stands on reporting, not on the underlying document or transcript.
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