Five of six college students made their first appearance in court Thursday, facing charges after they allegedly lured a man to their Massachusetts college as part of a To Catch a Predator-style trend on social media.
The students, all adult teenagers attending Assumption University in Worcester, Mass., were arraigned on conspiracy and kidnapping charges. Automatic guilty pleas were entered for all defendants, who are listed as Kelsy Brainard, 18; Easton Randall, 19; Kevin Carroll, 18; Isabella Trudeau, 18, and Joaquin Smith, 18.
Brainard was also charged with intimidation, and Carroll was accused of assault and battery with a deadly weapon.
A sixth defendant, a juvenile, is also facing charges but is expected to be arraigned separately.
A criminal complaint, filed in Worcester District Court in early December, says one of the students invited a man she met on the dating app Tinder to the campus, where he was ambushed by a larger group of students who accused him of being a sexual predator and filmed the confrontation as part of a “deliberately staged event.”
Two students assaulted the man as he tried to flee, the complaint says, with at least 25 people chasing him.
Police say there was no indication that the man was trying to meet anyone underage on the campus and that the woman who invited him to the campus, 18-year-old Brainard, had her real age listed on her dating profile.
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The target — a 22-year-old active-duty military service member — told police that he was in town for his grandmother’s funeral in October and “just wanted to be around people that were happy,” according to a campus police report. He said the student who invited him over led him into a basement lounge.
A few minutes later, “a group of people came out of nowhere and started calling him a pedophile,” accusing him of wanting sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report.
As he tried to get in his car, he was punched in the head and the door was slammed on him, he said.
Police say the whole confrontation was captured on surveillance video. A group of men, they said, emerged from “secreted” locations in a lounge area and tried to physically prevent him from leaving before he broke free.
Video suggests the entire episode lasted less than three minutes, and shows that after the man fled in his car, “you see the group coming back in [the building], laughing and high-fiving with each other.”
After the assault, Brainard reported the man to police as a sexual predator and said she was frightened by him. She said he had come to campus uninvited and that she texted a male friend who chased him away. All of this was false, campus police concluded after reviewing the surveillance recordings and finding that “first person perspective videos” were being circulated among students.
The Assumption University president, Greg Weiner, said in a statement that the behaviour described by the police was “abhorrent and antithetical to Assumption University’s mission and values.”
“This situation is particularly sobering because the victim is an active-duty military service member,” the statement said, according to The New York Times. “His service reminds us of the sacrifices made by those who defend our freedoms, including the opportunity to pursue a college education.”
The incident at the private Catholic university, police say, looks to be tied to a popular TikTok trend where users try to ensnare or set up sexual predators and pedophiles and share the confrontations online.
One of the students, Randall, told police that the groups had been inspired by the NBC series To Catch a Predator, which aired in the mid-2000s and featured undercover sting operations where unsuspecting men were lured via the internet to a house where they thought they were meeting an underage teen for sex. The host, Chris Hansen, would then confront them as they were ambushed by a camera crew and arrested by police.
The student said that “catch a predator is a big thing on TikTok currently but that this got out of hand and went bad,” according to the police statement.
According to local outlet the Telegram & Gazette, all five students were released on personal recognizance Thursday.
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