33-YEAR-OLD WOMAN PRETENDS TO BE A SCHOOL STUDENT FOR A YEAR TO PROVE
Shelby Hewitt helped con artists and her "fellow" students by posing as 13 years old and even getting braces. Some of the best years of our lives are spent in high school because we get to spend all day with our closest friends, worry-free, and graduate earlier than most people do. Naturally, there are times when you wish you could go back in time and experience your childhood again, but that is not possible due to the laws of physics.
However, one woman in her thirties decided to attempt this by pretending to be a teenager and going to high school for a full year. For a whole year, Shelby Hewitt of Canton, Massachusetts, tricked everyone by posing as a student at three different high schools using various aliases.
Hewitt, who was 31 at the time, "used the student transfer process and enrolled under multiple pseudonyms" in Boston over a year to enrol as a student at Jeremiah E. Burke High School, Brighton High School, and English High School using fictitious identification and documentation.
She is thought to have paid cash for the $377,000 condo she purchased in Worcester, a nearby city 40 miles east of Boston, shortly before the start of her school term. She reportedly told her friends that she had received over $1 million from a family inheritance. She went by the name "Daniella" at Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester. Her "backstory" was that, despite her high level of education and her work as a social worker, she was a teen foster child who was trafficked for sex and was illiterate.
She even got braces and joined the school basketball team while feigning to be a 13-year-old. Despite this, she continued to make time for her adult friends outside of school, even taking a trip to Colorado with them. Hewitt's childhood best friend Katie, who chose not to reveal her second name, told The Boston Globe that she and her friends wanted to extend their vacation by one day, but Hewitt was 'adamant about needing to return for work'.
“I asked if we could shift the trip or stay another day but she said she absolutely couldn’t because of work and she didn’t have any PTO (paid time off)," Katie recalled.
Andria, another friend who, like Katie, did not reveal her second name, explained that after Hewitt's arrest, she got a call from a friend who apologized and told her how she had decided to relive her youth after speaking with a psychic. Hewitt was the maid of honour at Andria's wedding in 2022, and three years earlier, the two had gone to a psychic to help Hewitt deal with the death of her mother.
However, Hewitt spoke to the medium once more, independently this time, and told Andria that the psychic had suggested that she go back to her early years to help her deal with her past traumas.
Timothy Flaherty, Hewitt's attorney, claims that she also suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly referred to as "multiple personality disorder."
Three counts of forgery, two counts of common law forgery, one count of uttering (putting counterfeit money into circulation), one count of identity fraud, one count of larceny exceeding $1,200 (theft of personal property), and one count of making false statements to her employer are all charges that Hewitt has denied.
According to the indictment, she committed fraud between December 2021 and February 2023 while employed as a social worker at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. She allegedly carried out the scheme to deceive the Boston Public School system into believing she was a 13-year-old girl. She is set to stand trial at the end of the year.