Crime
The Canton woman enrolled as a teen at three high schools in the Boston Public Schools district during the 2022 to 2023 academic year.
Shelby Hewitt at her sentencing Tuesday in Suffolk Superior Court after agreeing to a plea deal. Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe
A former Massachusetts social worker who was accused of posing as a student at three Boston high schools pleaded guilty to five charges Tuesday in a plea deal with prosecutors.
Shelby Hewitt, 34, of Canton, pleaded guilty in Suffolk Superior Court to three counts of forgery, one count of identity fraud, and one count of violating public employee conduct standards, court records show. Four other charges, including larceny, false writing, and two additional counts of forgery, were dismissed as part of the deal.
Hewitt was sentenced to four years of probation and ordered to pay more than $9,000 in restitution under the terms of the agreement, court records show. She was also ordered to stay away from all Boston Public Schools (BPS), continue mental health treatment, and not seek future employment as a social worker.
Prior to reaching an agreement with prosecutors, Hewitt was scheduled to stand trial Feb. 9. She was initially caught and charged in June 2023 after a BPS staff worker noticed “irregularities” in her student paperwork.
Timothy Flaherty, Hewitt’s attorney, previously told the judge in the case that Hewitt would only accept a deal if the case was continued without a finding, according to The Boston Globe. Prosecutors, on the other hand, insisted that she had to be found guilty as part of the agreement.
During the 2022 to 2023 academic year, Hewitt, a former Department of Children and Families (DCF) employee, used aliases to enroll at Brighton High School, Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester, and English High School in Jamaica Plain. Under the names “Daneilla” and “Ellie,” she attended school for months, befriending actual students and even joining the girls’ basketball team.
Hewitt went to great lengths to cover up her ruse, going as far as creating two fictional DCF social workers and purchasing a domain similar to the one that appears in state employees’ email addresses. Inconsistencies that BPS staff eventually found in her paperwork included an incorrect DCF letterhead and the name of a non-existent social worker.
At previous court appearances, Flaherty said that Hewitt has “a long-standing lifelong, well-documented history” of mental health struggles, the Globe reported. These challenges, Flaherty said, include a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, which affects her personality.
Flaherty did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening.
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