Posted on 06/26/2008 11:16:40 AM PDT by MissEdie
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.
Count on WIS News 10 to keep you posted on any new developments.
This is a gross misuse of the term “lynching.” It was an altercation. No one died. No one was strung up from a tree.
Where’s the “lynching”?
I would infer that they were talking about the lynching of the English language...
Perhaps it's an Associated Press article that got by the Mods?
Couldn’t agree more. It’s shocking to see words lose their meaning in this manner. It was grosely misused.
I had the same reaction as I read the article.
This is a South Carolina legalism—it just means a group of people ganging up to assault one person.
“Lynching”? Is there something we don’t know about the race of the participants, to trigger this bizarre charge? Sure sounds like assault and battery, with maybe an unlawful restraint.
It's all in the "style", dontcha know.
Nice use of the word “lynching”, sheesh.
I didn't see any reference to lynching, but I do wonder why school administrators are allowed to roam about the streets without an escort.
Here in SC it’s Lynching if there is more than one person doing the assaulting, it doesn’t have anything to do with trying to hang someone from a tree, which is what most people think of when they hear the word “Lynching”. The fact there were several people involved in the incident is why they were charged with Lynching. Does this help? SC laws don’t make a lot of sense most of the time.
LOL… nice!
As Professional Journalists (TM), the authors of this article have the privilege of changing the definitions of words spontaneously in order to better inform the reader.
We see them do this in their coverage of Iraq all the time. For example, “failure” is a condition in which you dethrone, capture, try, and execute an enemy leader, and set up a friendly power structure in place of the formerly hostile government. A “setback” is an event that results in the deaths and captures of dozens of insurgents. In the context of the events last month surrounding the Madhi army, a “victory” is an agreement that consists of being forced to surrender your weapons and permit Iraqi national security forces to search your neighborhood house by house.
See #7—in this context, “lynching” is a legal term particular to South Carolina that I think applies to a mob attack on a single person or small group. WIS is the NBC affiliate in Columbia, SC, so it makes sense they’d use the local legal term for what happened.
}:-)4
"If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have? Four. Calling it a tail doesn't make it one."
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, though I could be wrong.
After reading the comments on this thread it is evident most do not understand the meaning of the word lynch. It does not mean to hang or string up. For instance a lynch mob might run someone out of town or tar and feather them. It only means a group of people decide to take thier form of justice into thier own hands without due process.
Whoops, you already explained it better than I did. :)
I miss South Carolina (I lived in Columbia for seven years). Y’all do things a little, uh, different!
}:-)4
“If they’re ain’t no Noose, you let them loose.”
What color were they?
thier?
Lynching, an enumerated felony in some states in the United States, is defined by some codes of law as "Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person which results in the death of the person," with a 'mob' being defined as "the assemblage of two or more persons, without color or authority of law, for the premeditated purpose and with the premeditated intent of committing an act of violence upon the person of another."
Learn something every day...
Corruption of the English language.
Not a lynching? Her weave got pulled out off her head!
Given that it's Clarendon County, and given that one "had the weave pulled out of her head" I think it's a pretty safe guess that they aren't white....but I could be wrong.
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