State neglect killed Emory and Harlow Deacon in South Carolina

By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit · October 4, 2026

Justine May faces homicide charges after her daughters starved, but the state's repeated failure to act on warnings makes the Charleston County Sheriff's Office complicit in this tragedy.

The state of South Carolina was inside the house. They were in the rooms. They saw the mother. They just didn't see the children. Emory Deacon, 2, and Harlow Deacon, 15 months old, died of starvation and dehydration. Their mother, Justine May, is now in the Al Cannon Detention Center facing two counts of homicide by child abuse. But we cannot let the handcuffs on a broken woman hide the systemic rot that let babies waste away. When police and social services visit a home repeatedly and miss starvation, the state fails. It is no longer a safety net. It is a witness to a crime it had the power to stop.

Trips to a graveyard

The Charleston County Sheriff's Office didn't just miss a sign. They missed a mountain of them. According to the Post and Courier, deputies made previous trips to the home on Pinewood Drive. These were not random stops. They were welfare checks. They were visits coordinated with the South Carolina Department of Social Services and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health Mobile Crisis Unit.

Fox News reports that deputies had contact with May and the children twice in August and three times in September. The deputies claimed they saw "no obvious signs of concern." This is the same bureaucratic blindness I saw in Flint. It is the same lie told to people whose water was poison while officials checked boxes on a form. The state tells you they are "monitoring" the situation while the vulnerable are dying in plain sight.

The 2008 Financial Crisis followed this same script. Oversight bodies ignored every red flag of a systemic collapse. They looked at the rot and called it a stable market. Then the houses vanished from my block. Here, the "market" was the survival of the toddlers, and the state looked at a starving home and saw nothing wrong.

The warnings the state ignored

While the deputies were checking boxes, the family was screaming. WCIV reported on emails and texts from relatives who saw the disaster coming. One relative warned May that her state of mind "could lead to you harming the girls and/or yourself." Another relative explicitly mentioned the Lindsay Clancy trial, asking if a "dark entity" had taken over May's eyes.

These were not vague worries. They were specific, frantic pleas for intervention. The family tried to bridge the gap that the state left open. They offered love and safety, but they could not force the state to actually do its job.

Justine May told detectives she spent the last two weeks in a "blur." She told them she could not remember the last time she fed her daughters. This is the language of a total mental collapse. The South Carolina Department of Mental Health Mobile Crisis Unit was already involved. They had access. They had the mandate. Yet they let a woman drift into a void while her children starved.

This is the Grenfell Tower fire in a living room. In that disaster, institutions failed to act on repeated warnings and red flags of imminent danger to vulnerable residents. The mechanism is identical. In both cases, the people in charge decided that paperwork was more important than people.

A ledger of indifference

The Charleston County Sheriff's Office is now conducting an internal review. We know how these go. They will find a "communication breakdown." They will blame a few deputies for "poor judgment." They will call it a tragedy of errors.

But this was not an error. It was a choice. Every time a deputy walked out of that house in September and reported "no concern," they made a choice. Every time the Department of Social Services closed a file without removing the children, they made a choice.

The Lindsay Clancy trial showed us what happens when mental health crises are treated as secrets until they become homicides. South Carolina is repeating the mistake. They are waiting for the bodies to be found before they acknowledge the crisis. They treat the aftermath as a criminal matter because it is easier than treating the cause as a healthcare failure.

The Charleston County Sheriff's Office will produce a whitewashed report to shield its leadership. They will scapegoat a few officers to avoid institutional liability. But no amount of bureaucratic shuffling changes why Emory and Harlow died. The state decided they were not worth a real investigation. Justice isn't just jailing Justine May. Justice demands a full, independent accounting. We need answers for every person who walked in and left while those children starved.

State neglect killed Emory and Harlow Deacon in South Carolina

Trips to a graveyard

The warnings the state ignored

A ledger of indifference

Sources