Kentucky This article is more than 9 years oldMother of 13-year-old girl who went on crime spree with boyfriend arrested
This article is more than 9 years old- Accused of taking daughter from father’s house despite not having custody
- Boyfriend says they were fleeing girl’s abusive family
- Daughter and 18-year-old boyfriend stole vehicles and checks in multistate run
The mother of one of the two teenage sweethearts from Kentucky who are suspected in a multistate crime spree of stolen vehicles and pilfered checks has been arrested.
Sherry Peters is accused of taking 13-year-old Cheyenne Phillips from her father’s house when she did not have the custodial rights to do that, according to an arrest warrant provided by Grayson County detention center chief deputy Bo Thorpe. Peters was arrested on Monday.
Phillips was found with her boyfriend, 18-year-old Dalton Hayes, on Saturday night in a stolen truck in Florida.
Thorpe says Peters has declined media interview requests and is scheduled to meet with an attorney on Thursday. Hayes is in jail awaiting extradition to Kentucky. Phillips was taken to a safe house, where arrangements will be made for her return home.
Hayes said in a jailhouse interview that he and Phillips were trying to escape her abusive family and that he wishes he had bought bus tickets instead of stealing trucks as they moved toward Florida.
Officials say Hayes and Phillips began their run from the law and their families earlier this month when they vanished from their small hometown of Leitchfield, Kentucky.
Hayes told the News Herald of Panama City, in Florida, they just wanted to escape Phillips’s family, who were beating her, and planned to make it to Miami.
“All I had to do was tell her to go home and none of this would’ve happened, but it’s hard to tell someone getting beat on to go home,” Hayes said. “But, if I could go back, I’d be paying for bus rides instead of stealing trucks.”
The abuse allegations are “something we’ll talk about when they get back to Kentucky”, the Grayson County sheriff, Norman Chaffins, told the Associated Press. He said he was unaware of any previous accusations of abuse.
The pair’s travels took them to South Carolina and Georgia and included a night in a frigid barn, Hayes said. The pair were arrested late on Saturday in Panama City Beach after authorities found them sleeping in a stolen vehicle.
Hayes agreed in court on Monday to return to Kentucky to face charges. He is expected to be charged in Kentucky with burglary, theft, criminal trespassing and criminal mischief. Phillips will face charges in juvenile court.
“It ain’t like we were killing cops and robbing stores,” unlike the notorious outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, to whom the couple were compared in some media reports, Hayes said. “We just went on a few high-speed chases.”
A Panama City Beach resident alerted police after recognizing Phillips as she left a Target on Saturday afternoon because she was wearing the same pink and brown boots in pictures posted online.
“I questioned it and kept looking at the picture, but it kind of made sense,” Steve Colford said. “If I was teenager on the run, I’d come to Panama City Beach.”
Florida’s department of children and families took Phillips to a safe house to make arrangements to return home.
Hayes’s mother, Tammy Martin, said the couple had been dating for about three months. She said the girl portrayed herself as being 19. By the time her son realized she was only 13, “he was already done in love with her”, Martin said.
He faces burglary and theft charges in his home county, stemming from an arrest late last year. He was planning to be at the local judicial center on 5 January to find out if a grand jury had indicted him on the charges, his mother said. His case did not come up, but by that time the teens were gone.
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