A 32-year-old Boston woman is charged with impersonating a high school student at three different schools in the area, according to authorities.
Following the filing of a criminal complaint on Tuesday, Shelby Hewitt, of Canton, Massachusetts, was charged with identity theft and document forgery.
Hewitt was initially brought to police’s attention when Ellie Alessandra Blake, a student at English High School in Jamaica Plain, called the school’s principal.
On June 14, a man who identified himself only as ‘John Smith’ entered the high school and told them he would be withdrawing Blake, who he claimed was his daughter.
It is still unclear who ‘John Smith’ is and what his relation to Hewitt is. An incident report obtained by Metro.co.uk listed him as an involved person, as well as a teacher who offered to help ‘Ellie’ with her bullying problems.
According to the school, Smith said he would be enrolling Blake in a different school because she was experiencing ‘bullying’ at the hands of other students.
‘The school found it odd because “Ellie” was just enrolled on Thursday, June 8, and just earlier in the morning they had begun to address the bullying,’ the criminal complaint against the fraudster states.
The school became concerned that Blake’s parents were having a custody issue, so they began looking through her enrollment documentation.
‘It was when looking through the paperwork that a school administrator had noticed that one of the forms submitted for enrollment was not right,’ the complaint reads.
The form, from the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF), listed a contact info for a social worker named ‘Michelle Delfi’ – but upon investigating the school found that no such person was ever employed by the department.
‘Ellie’ was eventually determined to be Shelby Hewitt, a former social worker at the DCF. She has not been employed by the DCF as of February 2023, the department said in a statement.
The next day on June 15, investigators executed a search warrant at Shelby Hewitt’s apartment in Jamaica Plain.
Inside, they found ‘falsely made, altered, or forged Court Mittimus documents from the Lowell Juvenile Court and the DCF,’ her criminal complaint reads.
After searching through Boston Public School records, investigators concluded that Hewitt had been attending multiple high schools from September 7, 2022 through June 14, 2023.
Officials confirmed that she had enrolled at English High School, Jeremiah Burke High School, and Brighton High School over the course of the school year by ‘utilizing the student transfer process and enrolling under multiple pseudonyms.’
While she was at Burke High School, Hewitt went by the name ‘Daneilla.’
According to students at Burke, ‘Daneilla’ claimed to be an immigrant from Colombia and was in the foster system, the Boston Globe reported.
While at the school, ‘Daneilla’ made friends with other students and played with the women’s basketball team, Burke students told the paper.
Mary Skipper, the superintendent of Boston Public Schools, said she was ‘deeply troubled’ by the incident, and said Hewitt has been ordered to stay away from public school facilities.
‘While the investigation is in its early stages and remains ongoing, school officials have not identified any incidents of harm to students or staff,’ Skipper wrote in a letter sent to parents and students.
However, authorities have still not released a motive for the strange incident. In a radio interview at WBUR on Monday, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called the news ‘extremely disturbing.’
Earlier this year, a 29-year-old woman in New Jersey was caught after enrolling in a local high school.