Superintendent Mary Skipper said a 32-year-old woman was arrested last week for fraud. She had enrolled in multiple high schools in Boston this school year.
Superintendent Skipper informed parents in a letter distributed to students on Tuesday that a woman was under investigation by the police and had been prohibited from entering Boston Public Schools.
According to the police report, a man who said he was the woman’s father showed up at English High School on June 14. He informed the staff that he wished to remove his daughter from school due to bullying.
In 2022-2023, the woman attended Jeremiah E. Burke High Academic, Brighton High School, and English High School using multiple false identities and the student transfer process.
“Daniella” reportedly started at Jeremiah E. Burke High School in the fall, where she stayed to herself and was not particularly outgoing.
People familiar with the probe believe the woman is 32-year-old ex-social worker Shelby Hewitt from the Department of Children and Families. When given a yearbook photo of Hewitt from when she was a sophomore at Sharon High School—when the kids at Burke High School knew her as Daneilla—many agreed it was a match.
Parents and students at the Burke were perplexed as to why a lady in her twenties would dress as a teenager and spend months posing as a pupil.
She was not only too old appearing to be a high school student, but despite her diminutive stature, she also drove a vehicle and dressed a little too well for school.
Daniella said she was held back as a freshman in Lamons’s math and history classes. Several pupils said that Daneilla said she was from Colombia but had trouble with reading and writing.
She later joined the girls’ basketball team and wore jersey number 32. They noticed an older man they took as her foster dad watching her play their games. The lady was pictured with the squad on media day but stood to the side with the coach because, she said, her foster parents wouldn’t let her be in the photos.
Daneilla’s old teammates were astonished and uneasy when they found out she was a lady disguised as a youngster.
She might face several charges of forgery and identity theft if she enrolled under more than one name while pretending to be a student. Patrick Murphy, a criminal defense attorney in Boston who is unaffiliated with the case, suggested that she might be looking at several years in jail.
