A group of Worcester students accused of luring a man to campus and framing him as a pedophile appeared in court Thursday.
Five Massachusetts college students made their first appearances in court Thursday, accused of plotting to lure a man through a dating app into visiting campus last fall and then seizing him as part of a “Catch a Predator” trend on TikTok.
The students, all teens at Assumption University, a private, Roman Catholic school in Worcester, were arraigned on conspiracy and kidnapping charges in Worcester District Court. Automatic not guilty pleas were entered for all of them, and they are due back in court March 28 for a pre-trial conference.
The defendants in the case are Kelsy Brainard, 18; Easton Randall, 19; Kevin Carroll, 18; Isabella Trudeau, 18; and Joaquin Smith, 18. There is a sixth defendant is a juvenile who was expected to be arraigned separately.
Police said Brainard’s Tinder account was used to correspond with the man. She faces an additional charge of witness intimidation. A male student in the group also faces a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
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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 a student whose Tinder profile said she was 18 invited him over and 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.
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The man told police that he broke free and was chased by at least 25 people to his car, where he was punched in the head and his car door was slammed on him. He fled and called city police.
Campus surveillance video shows a large group of students, including the woman, “all with their cellphones out in what seems to be a recording of the whole episode,” the police statement said. They are seen “laughing and high fiving with each other” in what appeared to be “a deliberately staged event,” and there was no evidence to indicate the man was seeking sexual relations with underage girls, the police report said.
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 surveillance recordings and finding that “first person perspective videos” were being circulated among students.
The students told police they were inspired by a trend on TikTok.
Before leaving court, where cameras were turned on them, the teens were ordered to have no contact with the targeted man.
"We're just relying on the legal system to move forward and provide justice," the victim's father told NBC10 Boston.
Julie Harmon, who runs a Facebook page called "Predator Poachers Massachusetts," says this case makes people like her — who advocate sharing information on sex offenders and suspected predators — look bad.
"These things stick to people for the rest of their life," she said. "If you're going to call somebody a child predator, it's smarter to have actual, valid proof."
A lawyer for Brainard, Christopher Todd, said, “We’re just looking forward to having the process play out.” The lawyer for Trudeau, Robert Iacovelli, said afterward his client is innocent and he filed a motion seeking dismissal of the charges against her.
Other attorneys were not immediately reached for comment about their pleas.
