A 28-year-old New York woman was arrested at a school campus in the Bronx and charged with endangering the welfare of a child, trespassing, and criminal impersonation after enrolling at the school as a 16-year-old girl, under a fake name.
Last month, Kacy Claassen enrolled at the Westchester Square Academy as Shamara Rashad, born in 2010, who had just moved to New York from Ohio with her sister. She attended classes for about two weeks and was even issued a school ID with her fake name and age, but then someone discovered her social media profiles.
Despite going through the trouble of impersonating a 16-year-old, Claassen never bothered deleting her social media posts or at least make them private, and they eventually reached the faculty at Westchester Square Academy.
One of the woman’s social media pages listed her birth date as July 29, 1997, and one photo showed her holding a baby girl. In one of her posts she admits that she has a beautiful daughter. Repeatedly confronted about her identity, the 28-year-old admitted that she had lied, claiming that a friend had advised her to enroll so she would qualify for more social assistance.
Police believe that Kacy Claassen was trying to cash in on some sort of benefits scheme, but they didn’t go into details. The 28-year-old woman was arrested and subsequently released. She has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child, trespassing, and criminal impersonation, to which she pleaded ‘not guilty’. She is expected back in Court on June 15.
Interestingly this isn’t the first time we’ve featured an adult posing as a high-school student and actually enrolling in high-school. A few years back, we wrote about a 29-year-old woman who attended high school while posing as a teen, just so she could “relive her glry days”.
