Attending high school gives us some of the best years of our lives – you’re spending all day with your best friends, have zero worries and you finish school earlier than the typical nine to five job.
Of course, there are days where you wish you could turn back time and relive your youth – but the laws of physics doesn’t allow that.
Though one woman in her thirties decided to try and do just this by posing as a teenager and attending high school for an entire year.
A 33-year-old woman pretending to be a teenager
Shelby Hewitt, from Canton, Massachusetts, fooled everyone for an entire year as she pretended to be a student at three separate high schools under different aliases.
Hewitt, who was 31 at the time, used false identification and paperwork to enrol as a student at Jeremiah E Burke High School, Brighton High School and English High School, by ‘utilizing the student transfer process and enrolling under multiple pseudonyms’ in Boston over the course of a year.
Her school term started soon after having bought a condo in Worcester, a neighboring city 40 miles to the east of Boston, for $377,000 – which she is believed to have paid cash for, having apparently told her friends that she received more than $1 million from a family inheritance.
Shelby Hewitt is alleged to have pretended to be a teenager as young as 13 named Daniella (Boston Police Department)
Fabricating stories to fit her ‘character’
At Jeremiah E Burke High School in Dorchester, she went by the name ‘Daniella’ whose ‘backstory’ was that she was a sex-trafficked teen foster kid unable to read or write – this is despite being highly educated and was working as a social worker.
She was pretending to be a teen as young as 13-years-old, and even got braces and joined a school basketball team. All the while, she still found time to hang out with her adult friends outside of school, and even went on vacation to Colorado with them.
Speaking to The Boston Globe, Katie, one of Hewitt’s best friends growing up who withheld her second name, explained how her and her friends wanted to stay another day on their vacation, 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.
Hewitt was able to juggle posing as a teenager in high school along with living her real life, which included socialising with friends (Sharon High)
Hewitt’s reason for pretending to be a high schooler
Another friend named Andria, who like Katie withheld her second name, explained following Hewitt’s arrest she received a phone call from her former friend, who apologized and detailed how she decided to relive her youth following a discussion with a psychic.
At Andria’s wedding in 2022, Hewitt was the maid of honor and three years prior to that, the pair had visited a psychic to help Hewitt grieve the loss of her mom.
But Hewitt spoke to the medium again, this time on her own, and claimed to Andria that she was advised by the psychic that she should revisit her childhood to help heal her past traumas.
According to her lawyer, Timothy Flaherty, Hewitt also possesses dissociative identity disorder (DID), which was once commonly known as ‘multiple personality disorder‘.
Hewitt seen with her lawyer Timothy Flaherty in court (NBC Boston)
What are the charges against Hewitt and when is the trial?
Hewitt has denied all charges – three counts of forgery, two of forgery at common law, one of uttering (put forged money into circulation), one of identity fraud, another of larceny over $1,200 (theft of personal property), and finally one count of making false claims to her employer.
The indictment alleges that her fraudulent activities occurred between December 2021 and February 2023, claiming while working as a social worker at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, she carried out the scheme to convince the Boston Public School system that she was a child as young as 13.
She is set to stand trial at the end of the year.
