Chiquitta Dawkins faces child neglect charge after girl found with frail bones and a limp

A South Carolina woman, Chiquitta Dawkins, faces charges after a 12-year-old was found weighing 47 pounds with no school records past kindergarten.

A 12-year-old in Bowman, South Carolina, weighed 47 pounds when deputies found her. The paper trail documenting her life had stopped years earlier.

PEOPLE reported that Chiquitta Dawkins, 43, has been charged with unlawful conduct toward a child following the discovery. Orangeburg County Sheriff Leroy Ravenell announced the charge in an Oct. 22 release, describing a child suffering from severe malnutrition after deputies were summoned to the location.

The physical toll was visible. According to the sheriff’s office, the girl had frail bones and walked with a limp. She was taken to an emergency room Oct. 2 and treated at Novant Health Hemby Children’s Hospital, where WLTX reported she required a feeding tube and a wheelchair.

To put the weight in context, 47 pounds falls at roughly the average for a six- or seven-year-old. The child is twelve.

The detail that compounds everything else is administrative. Investigators found no education records for her after kindergarten, meaning roughly seven years passed without her appearing in any school system.

Ravenell made his assessment plain. “There are no reasonable people on this planet who could possibly think this is fine,” he said. “Leaving a child to become this sick, this malnourished is the utmost in despicable.”

Dawkins’ relationship to the girl has not been confirmed publicly. WLTX noted that an incident report lists her at the same Bowman address given for the child’s mother, though the nature of that connection remains unestablished in the available records.

She was booked into the Orangeburg-Calhoun Regional Detention Center and granted a $35,000 surety bond on Oct. 21. Conditions include GPS monitoring and compliance with pending family court orders along with any requirements set by the South Carolina Department of Social Services. She is scheduled to appear in court, and whether she has retained an attorney remains unclear.

Neither the social services department nor the sheriff’s office responded to the outlet’s requests for comment.

Cases like this one surface questions extending well past a single household. A child absent from school for seven years represents a gap that multiple systems are built to catch, from district attendance officers to truancy courts to state welfare agencies. Each of those mechanisms exists precisely because a child who stops showing up is often a child in trouble at home.

Bowman is a town of fewer than a thousand residents, which makes the invisibility harder to account for rather than easier. How she went unnoticed that long is a question the charge against Dawkins does not answer.