Murder In Talladega

August 14th, the summer of 2022, a couple just at the start of their journey into adulthood headed out for a day of hiking in the Talladega National Forest down in Alabama. It was a Sunday, the sun was shining and school started on Monday. The only thing left to do was squeeze in one last trip out to see the waterfalls before these two young people had their very first classes of the semester at the University of Central Florida the following day.

Twenty-two-year-old Adam Simjee and Mikayla Paulus, who was only twenty years old at the time, had been out to the park many times before that fateful Sunday. In fact, the forests in the national park were some of Adam’s favorite places to go, especially when he could go there when the weather was good and he had his girlfriend Mikayla by his side.

The young couple set out pretty early that morning and were already driving around the park around ten o’clock when they spotted something on the side of the road that made them pull over and stop the car.

A young woman had flagged them down and right beside her was a broken down vehicle of her own that she needed help with. Twenty-one-year-old Yasemine Hider was camping up in the woods with her friend and was on her way into town to pick up some much needed food and supplies when her friend’s car had suddenly stopped working. Yasemine was then left stranded on the side of the road and that’s why she’d just stopped Adam and Mikayla to ask for help.

Adam didn’t hesitate and jumped right in. Both he and Mikayla spent over an hour with Yasemine on the side of the park road, desperately trying to fix her car. They even called some of their relatives for advice on what to do and when they still couldn’t get Yasemine’s car running, they even offered to go and get her help from the closest ranger station. 

That was how much both Adam and Mikayla wanted to help Yasemine and that was why Yasemine’s sudden shift in demeanor caught them so off guard.

After all of that time and effort the two of them had just put into trying to help her, Yasemine pulled out the gun she’d been concealing from the young couple this whole time and started barking out orders. In another surprising and chilling twist in this case, she then filmed herself marching Adam and Mikayla into the forests that surrounded the park road.

Now concealed from any potential witnesses that may drive by, Yasemine demanded Adam and Mikayla’s banking information, still recording herself in what would turn out to be a horrifying and grisly archive of someone’s final moments. The video shows her giving one last order to the couple as she marched them into the woods and that was for them to drop their phones. 

It was after that that all Hell broke loose.

In another unexpected twist of this case, while Adam dropped his phone onto the forest floor that day, he pulled out his own surprise for Yasemine: a 9mm gun that he’d been hiding himself. Adam then ordered Yasemine to put down her weapon and a fragile stalemate ensued.

“Are you serious?” Yasemine asks on the recording, but then she pulled the trigger before anyone could respond. 

Her gun jammed and while she was rushing to get it working again, Adam threw himself into the line of fire to protect Mikayla. He shot at Yasemine, but by then Yasemine had a working weapon as well.

It was only 11:30 that Sunday morning when the nearby ranger station that Adam and Mikayla had just offered to get Yasemine help from received a call reporting a shootout in the forest. While their ranger teams began the long drive up into the mountain to reach the chaotic scene, Yasemine and Adam were just about done exchanging blows. Yasemine had been shot several times in the chest. Adam had been shot only once, but by another twist of fate, he’d come out on the bottom.

“Why did you shoot?” Yasemine says on her own recording. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

As both Adam and Yasemine laid bleeding out in the middle of the forest, two witnesses were left standing. One was the terrified twenty-year-old Mikayla and the other a thirty-seven-year-old woman who’d only tangle the thread of the story even further.

Krystal Diane Pinkins had also been on the side of the road that day and a witness to the shootout that went down between Adam and Yasemine, but she was also tied to this case in many more ways than that. Not only was she the owner of the car that Yasemine had been trying to get Adam and Mikayla to fix, but she was also the friend who’d set up camp with Yasemine somewhere out in the park.

While Adam was fighting to save Mikayla and his own life, Mikayla spotted Krystal hiding in the trees and pleaded with her to go and get help. Krystal, either terrified herself or torn between helping her friend and the absolute insanity that their attempted robbery had descended into, turned tail and ran.

Realising that Krystal wasn’t going to help them, Mikayla then changed tracks and as the shots died out, she made a run for her phone and called emergency services.

Now knowing that help was finally on the way, Mikayla rushed back to Adam, who was lying not far away from where Yasemine was. Both shooters were incapacitated by then, but Adam was really in bad shape. Mikayla then desperately began performing CPR to try to keep her boyfriend alive until paramedics could get there, but because of how far they were out into the park that day, it took first responders a devastating half an hour to reach the site. When they got there, they walked onto the scene where Mikayla was still performing CPR on Adam, but Adam was gone.

Beside them, his killer still laid bleeding out but alive and awake enough to start making demands all over again. As paramedics began addressing the gunshot wounds on her chest, Yasemine kept asking how much trouble she was in. “I know I’m going to get time for this,” she said. “I just want to know how much.”

While Yasemine was first taken by ambulance and then airlifted to the hospital, investigators at the scene had to interview the distraught Mikayla. Still reeling from her shock and her grief, Mikayla managed to give an account of what had just happened and a description of the woman she’d seen disappear back into the forest during the shootout.

Piecing together the bits of information that Yasemine had drip fed the couple as they’d tried to fix her car for her that morning, the investigators determined that there was a camp nearby where an unknown number of people were living off-grid and these people were more than likely armed and, if Yasemine was anything to go by, dangerous.

Teams of investigators and rangers scoured the area and even brought in sniffer dogs to locate this camp and anyone else who could be involved in Adam Simjee’s murder. Only about half a mile away, those teams found what they were looking for: an armed camp and the scene of another potential shoot out.

They managed to catch the woman standing outside a tent on her own off guard. But as the police were shouting for her to lie down on the ground, another person approached the scene wielding a shotgun. What followed was an incredibly tense stalemate, one where the police found themselves facing a loaded weapon and not wanting to be the ones to shoot first.

This case made another unforeseen and unbelievable twist yet again when Krystal’s son approached camp with that loaded shotgun in his hands and yet another twist when officers realized that Krystal’s son was only five years old.

The police asked the child to put down the gun, but the boy could see his mother lying down on the ground outside the tent that the three of them had all been living in and he was afraid. Probably not knowing what else to do, the boy started slowly stepping over to his mother, but he was still holding onto the gun. 

Everything could devolve again in a split second and someone else could potentially end up dead if the police didn’t get this situation under control quickly. Everyone had to watch and wait to see what the boy would do. No one there wanted to be the reason why this case would erupt into another shootout, especially when it now involved a five-year-old child. 

The boy inched over to his mother and eventually he put the gun down. He was just a kid and he was scared by all of these people suddenly turning up at their camp and at the end of things he just wanted his mother. In front of all of those armed officers, he made his way over to Krystal, put the gun down and then got down on the ground  so he could lie beside his mother.

Now that the boy was finally unarmed, the police then secured the scene and arrested Krystal. Her son was immediately taken into care and she was sent to jail for her part in the murder that had occurred only half a mile away from that campsite.

Yasemine later argued that she’d only approached Adam and Mikayla because she’d genuinely needed to get into town to get food and their car was broken. She said that the situation had just escalated so quickly and she would have been happy enough to just get a ride into town instead of the whole thing turning into a shootout that had left Adam dead. 

But Mikayla disagreed.

In response to Yasemine’s statement, Mikayla argued that she and Adam would have been more than happy to have dropped Yasemine into town themselves if she’d asked them to and that Yasemine was responsible for Mikayla losing the love of her life. In a later social media post, Mikayla wrote: “My reason for being, my soulmate, my life partner, the future father of my children, died in the middle of a state park in Alabama. No words can begin to describe the shock and pain I’m in.

“Adam is the best person I’ve ever met on the face of this entire planet. He was the most pure soul and he made sure I knew I would be safe when I was with him. It comforts me to say he passed in one of his favorite places, the forest in the mountains.”

“No other scenario could match this pain. I wish I could hold your hand one last time.”

Both Yasemine and Krystal pled guilty in federal court. Yasemine was found guilty of second degree murder, kidnapping and robbery and received thirty-five years in prison.