CLARENDON COUNTY, SC (WIS) - A school district employee faces lynching charges, and authorities say the victims were a group of teenagers. It was another quiet day in downtown manning until a mob scene broke out in the Dollar General parking lot. 'I heard the woman say they're fighting, they're fighting,' says Tonya, an employee at the Dollar General. 'I seen a little girl getting beat up, her weave being pulled out by a grown woman.'
A young girl was losing the fight to a woman nearly 30 years older. And Dana Hawkins wasn't holding back. Authorities say she even had help from another woman, 37-year-old Carol Smiling. 'The adults were holding down one or two of the juvenile victims, while the other juveniles were attacking them,' says Manning Police Sgt. Homes Smith.
Authorities say Hawkins' daughter jumped in along with another girl, and helped Hawkins and Smiling beat up three teenaged girls.
But why? it isn't clear to the Dollar General worker who saw it all unfold. 'What was going through my mind is that's a damn shame,' Tonya says, 'because a grown woman got no business in a child's mess.'
One of the victims tells us they were targeted because she'd recently broken up with Hawkins' son.
The mess sent Smiling, Hawkins, her daughter and friend to jail. They all face lynching charges in the mob-style beating of the young girls.
What authorities say is even more perplexing, is that Hawkins works as a benefits and payroll administrator with Clarendon County School District One. 'We have adults in altercations with adults all the time. But when you have adults in altercations with juveniles, someone has to have a cooler head,' says Sgt. Smith.
We called Hawkins at her home Wednesday, and were told she had no comment.
The superintendent of Clarendon County Schools tells us Hawkins is innocent until proven guilty. She still has her job, and the support of the district.
It is a gross abuse of language to call this 'lynching' but that is apparently how the law reads in SC.