Two little girls in Ladson, South Carolina starved to death in their own home, and their mother told detectives she could not remember when she last gave them food or water.

Justine Marie May, 31, is charged with two counts of homicide by child abuse. The children were roughly a year and a half and two and a half years old.

Deputies found them on September 29 after being sent to the home for a welfare check.

May was outside, crying and speaking incoherently. Both children were already dead inside.

The affidavits are what make this case difficult to read. May told investigators the previous two weeks had been a blur.

She could not say when she had last fed them. She acknowledged the children died from not eating and that withholding food was neglectful. She told detectives she had been their only caregiver through those weeks.

Investigators wrote that she showed extreme indifference for human life by failing to provide basic sustenance, and identified that failure as a primary contributor to the deaths.

There is a second part of this story, and it is the part Charleston County will have to answer for.

The sheriff’s office had been to that house five times. Two visits in August and three in September.

No obvious concerns were noted on any of them. The last visit while the children were still alive was September 20, nine days before they were found.

The office’s Professional Standards division has opened an internal review. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division’s Special Victims Unit and the state Department of Child Fatalities are assisting the investigation. Fox News reported the affidavit contents.

Five visits in two months is not a system that failed to look. It is a system that looked and did not see.

Two toddlers starving in a house is not a subtle condition. It takes weeks, it is visible on a child’s body, and it is visible in a kitchen.

Whatever those five visits consisted of, they were not that. Somebody stood in that home while two children were dying of hunger and wrote down that nothing appeared wrong.

There will be a prosecution and there should be. May will have a lawyer and a trial and the presumption of innocence that goes with it.

But a county that knocked on that door five times owes an explanation that does not end with a review of its own conduct conducted by itself.