BOSTON — A 32-year-old woman and former Department of Children and Families social worker is now facing criminal charges after allegedly posing as a student in three Boston high schools.
According to a criminal complaint issued Tuesday, Shelby Hewitt is facing two felony counts of forging documents and five other charges related to the scheme.
Boston police and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office began investigating after the principal at the English High School called police regarding a student, now identified as Hewitt, who was reportedly being bullied.
According to the report, school officials uncovered that after John Smith posed as Hewitt’s father and tried to withdraw her from English High because of the bullying she was allegedly receiving.
The police report said school officials found the decision odd since the woman was enrolled at the school less than a week earlier.
“Concerned that there may be some sort of custodial issue with the parents, the school began to ask from the district all of the enrollment paperwork,” the police report said. “It was when looking through the paperwork that a school administrator had noticed that one of the forms submitted for enrollment was not right.”
At various times during the 2022-2023 school year, she attended Jeremiah E. Burke High School, Brighton High School, and English High School while using the student transfer process and enrolling under multiple pseudonyms, BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper said in a letter to the school community.
The woman’s name was not released at the time of the initial investigation, but Boston 25 has obtained the criminal complaint that was used to charge Shelby Hewitt with that crime.
According to a police report, Hewitt also assumed the identity of a person associated with Lowell Juvenile Court, but it’s not clear if that person was a juvenile defendant or not.
The records show that on June 15, members of the Boston Police Human Trafficking Unit among several state agencies executed a search warrant at an apartment in Jamaica Plain where Hewitt was living and found a number of forged documents connected to both the juvenile court and DCF.
The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families said Hewitt is a former employee of the state agency and says she was hired as a social worker by DCF from 2016-2017, during parts of 2018, and from December 2021 through February 2023.
“The Department of Children and Families is working in collaboration with the District Attorney’s office in this matter,” according to a written statement from DCF Tuesday evening.
In a statement on the matter, Skipper called the incident a “breach of trust.”
“I am deeply troubled that an adult would breach the trust of our school communities by posing as a student,” Skipper said. “This appears to be a case of extremely sophisticated fraud. As soon as BPS personnel identified irregularities with the student’s enrollment, the case was referred to the Boston Police who are now undertaking a criminal investigation. I am grateful to the BPS staff who caught this and quickly acted and to the Boston Police for launching an immediate investigation.”
Boston 25 has reached out to Boston Public Schools for a comment regarding the criminal complaint.
Hewitt has not been arrested. The incident remains under investigation.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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