'Why did you do this? I feel betrayed and confused.'
A ‘millionaire’ social worker has been accused of posing as a troubled 13-year-old girl to trick a family into fostering her and going to school.
Shelby Hewitt, 32, found herself bullied by her classmates nearly 20 years her junior as they teased her for, well, looking like she was in her 30s.
Hewitt, also known as ‘Ellie Blake’, 13, and ‘Daniella Blake Herrerra’, 16, had conned her way into three schools in Boston, Massachusetts, and even tricked her therapist and partner into fostering her.
She had told officials she suffered from a genetic condition that prematurely aged her and that she was a victim of child trafficking, the Boston Globe reported.
Why she pulled off the alleged fraud remains unclear, with her mother and grandfather leaving her an inheritance thought to be up to $1 million (£797,250).
Hewitt has been charged with criminal forgery and identity fraud and will stand trial at the end of the year – she pled guilty in December.
Hewitt told the Boston Globe there was a ‘reason’ she masqueraded as a troubled teen but her lawyers advised she stay quiet.
The truth ‘will come out in time’, she told the newspaper.
One of Hewitt’s classmates, Janell Lamons, added: ‘Why did you do this? I feel betrayed and confused.’
Prosecutors say Hewitt graduated with a master’s in school counselling in 2016 but left her $50,000 job at the Department of Children and Families (DCF) two years later around the time her family members died.
She then posed as a DCF worker by making a fake email address to get ‘herself admitted as a child patient at the Walden Behavioral treatment center and enrolled herself in the Boston Public Schools’ in December 2021.
Hewitt, prosecutor Ashley Polin alleged in court, first enrolled at Jeremiah E Burke High School in Dorchester. After attending classes there for seven months, she then transferred to Brighton High for two months.
Her name, she would tell everyone, was 16-year-old Daniella Blake Herrera. After that, it was Ellie Blake, 13, now a student at English High School in Boston.
For most of the school year, Hewitt allegedly lived with her foster parents Rebecca Bernat and John Smith in Jamaica Plain. Neither knew anything about their daughter’s con trick.
The couple’s lawyer stressed in a statement: ‘John and Rebecca are among numerous people who genuinely believed a desperate young person was in need.’
But Hewitt’s plot unravelled when Michelle Delfi – the girl’s state social worker – told school administrators that actual teens had been teasing her.
Her efforts to appear like a youngster – complete with braces and putting her hair in a ponytail – hadn’t quite convinced her classmates.
Hewitt, Delfi said in a message to a guidance counsellor, was ‘really sensitive about people commenting on her face and how she looks older’.
School staff quickly sprang into action, completely unaware that Hewitt was very much not a teenager nor that Delfi didn’t exist – Hewitt was also playing the character of a social worker, prosecutors said.
Yet school officials had an inkling something was up. Principal Caitlin Murphy noticed that Delfi’s email address didn’t match up with the DCF and efforts to find Hewitt’s (or Ellie Blake’s, rather) birth certificate were fruitless.
Police arrested Hewitt in June 2023, with detectives claiming that she had been leading a double life.
Outside of school hours, they alleged, she was still working as a social worker and had even bought a $350,000 apartment in cash. All while attending classes and playing on the girls’ basketball team.
Lamons’ mother Robin Williams said she was stunned at how intricate Hewitt’s alleged swindle was.
‘To find out this 32-year-old is sitting in class with my daughter and other kids, and she jumped to three different schools, it was scary,’ she said.
Hewitt pleaded not guilty to three counts of document forgery, two counts of common law forgery, and one count each of uttering false or forged records, identity fraud, larceny over $1,200 (£957), and violating public employee standards of conduct.
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