Girls taken by U.S. fugitive released from hospital

The two girls kidnapped by a man suspected of killing their mother and older sister were released from a Tennessee hospital on Friday after a two-week ordeal that ended in the suicide of their captor.

The girls, 12-year-old Alexandria Bain and her 8-year-old sister, Kyliyah, left Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, a hospital spokeswoman, Anne Glankler, said.

“I’m so glad they’re OK,” Glankler said.

The girls were hospitalized Thursday after they were found in northern Mississippi, where Adam Mayes, 35, had been hiding with them.

Mayes, briefly the most-wanted fugitive in the United States, killed himself with a gunshot to the head when police closed in and ordered him to surrender, according to authorities.

Mississippi state game wardens had come across Mayes and the girls in the woods behind a church in Alpine, Miss., 120 kilometres from the rural western Tennessee town of Whiteville, where the girls lived.

“I told them it’s going to be OK,” Union County Sheriff Jimmy Edwards said he told the girls. “I gave them a big hug . . . When I seen these kids, it was a huge relief.”

The girls’ family members went to the hospital Thursday night, Glankler said. She did not reveal who the girls went home with Friday.

Authorities described Mayes as a friend of the Bain family, but said the relationship went wrong when the Bains announced a plan to move to Arizona. The husband reported his wife and three girls missing on April 27 when Mayes was helping them move.

Authorities said Mayes killed Jo Ann Bain, 31, and her oldest daughter, 14-year-old Adrienne, at their home that day, taking the two younger girls with him.

The bodies of the mother and older daughter were found in shallow graves on property belonging to Mayes’s mother in the northern Mississippi town of Guntown last weekend.

According to court affidavits, Mayes’s wife, Teresa, told investigators he had intended to take the two younger girls.

Mayes’s wife and mother were arrested Sunday and detained in Hardeman County Jail pending a preliminary hearing May 22.

Courtesy, Mississippi Department of Public Safety Adam Mayes, accused of killing a mother and daughter before disappearing for nearly two weeks with her two other children, killed himself. Alexandria Bain, 12, centre, and Kyliyah Bain, are back home safe.