The father of a 13-year-old girl who police say went on a multistate crime spree with her older boyfriend said on Tuesday that he is not angry with the 18-year-old.
Cheyenne Phillips, 13, and Dalton Hayes, 18, were arrested on Saturday last week in Panama City Beach, Florida, after authorities found them sleeping in a vehicle that had been reported stolen.
“I don’t have anything against him. I’m not upset with this boy. He’s a boy, and apparently he thinks something of my daughter. He’s just not thinking clearly,” Shawn Phillips, 38, told reporters.
Shawn Phillips also denied as “completely bogus” Hayes’ allegation that Cheyenne Phillips told him she had been abused at home.
“Anyone that knows us knows better,” Phillips said.
Hayes made the abuse allegations during a jailhouse interview with the News Herald of Panama City, telling the paper they just wanted to escape Phillips’ family — who she said were beating her — and planned to make it to Miami. Officials and others said on Tuesday that they did not know of any allegations of abuse.
“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.”
Shawn Phillips said that he and his former wife divorced before Cheyenne Phillips was born. He said he and his grandparents have raised her since she was three on their farm near Clarkson, where he said Cheyenne had everything she could ever want.
However, he said that Cheyenne would often lie to him. Still, she had a 9pm curfew on school nights and a 10pm curfew on weekends, rules that she never broke.
The abuse allegations are “something we’ll talk about when they get back to Kentucky,” Grayson County Sheriff Norman Chaffins told reporters.
He said he was unaware of any previous accusations of abuse.
The alleged crime spree started on Jan. 3, when police say Cheyenne Phillips’ mother, Sherry Phillips, picked Cheyenne up from her house near Clarkson. Sherry Phillips does not have custody or visitation rights with her daughter, and police arrested her on Monday on a charge of custodial interference. She is in jail on a US$50,000 cash bond and has a court hearing scheduled for today.
The pair’s travels took them to South Carolina and Georgia and included a night in a frigid barn, Hayes said.
Hayes agreed in court on Monday to return to Kentucky to face charges. He is expected to be charged with burglary, theft, criminal trespassing and criminal mischief.
Cheyenne Phillips is to face charges in juvenile court. Florida’s Department of Children and Families took her to a safe house to make arrangements to return home.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
RSS