WORCESTER, Mass. — Five Massachusetts college students appeared in court Thursday, accused of plotting to lure a man to their campus through a dating app, then grabbing him as part of a “Catch a Predator” trend » on TikTok.
The Assumption University students, all teenagers, were arraigned on charges of conspiracy and kidnapping. All have pleaded not guilty and are due back in Worcester District Court on March 28 for a pretrial conference.
The defendants — Kelsy Brainard, 18; Easton Randall, 19; Kevin Carroll, 18; Isabelle Trudeau, 18 years old; and Joaquin Smith, 18, stood in court impassive, showing little emotion and speaking to the judge only through lawyers. A sixth defendant was arraigned separately in juvenile court.
Police said Brainard’s Tinder account was used to lure the man to a private Roman Catholic school in Worcester. She faces an additional charge of witness intimidation. A student in the group also faces a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
The target — a 22-year-old active-duty military man — told police he was in town for his grandmother’s funeral in October and “just wanted to be around happy people,” according to a report campus police. So he turned to Tinder, where a woman whose profile said she was 18 invited him.
She greeted him, led him to a basement lounge, then a few minutes later, “a group of people came out of nowhere and started calling him a pedophile,” accusing him of wanting to have sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report. .
The man told police he broke free and was chased by at least 25 people to his car, where he was punched in the head and hit by the car door. was slammed before he managed to escape.
Campus surveillance video shows a large group of students, including the woman, “all with their cell phones out in what appears to be a recording of the entire episode,” the police statement said. They are seen “laughing and greeting each other” in what appears to be “a deliberately staged event,” and there was no evidence indicating the man was seeking to have sex with underage girls, according to the police report.
Randall told officers they were inspired by the “catch a predator” trend, which he said “is big on TikTok” right now. He said their group shared ideas about what to say to the man through the Tinder app to lure him to campus, then spread the word via a dorm group chat that a “ predator” was in the building, according to the report.
A review of the messages showed no indication that the man was looking for underage girls, police said.
After the assault, Brainard reported the man to police as a sexual predator and said she was afraid of him. She said he came to campus uninvited and she texted a friend who chased him away. This was all false, campus police concluded after reviewing surveillance recordings and finding that “first-person perspective videos” were circulating among students.
Before leaving the court, where cameras were trained on them, the teens were ordered to have no contact with the targeted man.
A Brainard attorney, Christopher Todd, said, “We look forward to seeing the process play out.” Trudeau’s lawyer, Robert Iacovelli, later said she was innocent. He filed a motion seeking dismissal of the charges against her, saying authorities had no probable cause to believe she committed a crime.
The other attorneys were not immediately contacted for comment on their pleas.
