A 33-year-old social worker who posed as an abused teenage orphan and went back to school has blamed a psychic for her behavior.
Shelby Hewitt, also known as ‘Ellie Blake’, 13, and ‘Daniella Blake Herrerra’, 16, allegedly conned her way into three high schools and an eating disorder treatment center, even tricking a therapist and her partner into becoming her foster parents.
Hewitt’s close friend Andria has revealed the alleged fraudster is claiming she was advised by a psychic to return to her childhood in order to heal past traumas.
Andria said she was duped by Hewitt for years. The social worker even made a heartwarming speech at her wedding as maid of honor before her shocking apparent double life came to light.
Andria told the Boston Globe it was actually her idea for Hewitt to go a psychic, after her mother passed away in May 2018 at the age of 65. Andria thought it would help her cope with the loss.
‘I had met with a few different mediums after my father passed away,’ Andria said. ‘I found that it helped with grief, trying to connect with a loved one who passed on, whether it was real or not.’
Hewitt and Andria met with a psychic called Ruthie Larkin – named as one of the top 100 in America – and they sat in on each other’s sessions.
Andria told the Globe Larkin would often speak of Hewitt ‘witnessing something traumatic as a child’, but at the time the friends appeared to think little of it.
But after Hewitt’s disturbing double lives were exposed, Andria said her old friend told her she had also gone to see another psychic alone who told her she had to find a way to return to her childhood in order to heal past wounds.
She also began revisiting other memories in a different light – including an occasion when Hewitt sent her a photograph of herself eating an ice cream sundae in Cabot’s asking her: ‘Don’t I look like a kid?’
Hewitt is charged with criminal forgery and identity fraud, and after she pleaded not guilty in December, she is set to stand trial at the end of the year.
According to prosecutors, she began her elaborate plot by pretending to be troubled 16-year-old Daniella Blake Herrera in mid-2022, shortly after she returned to work at the Department of Children and Families (DCF).
Graduating with her master’s degree in school counseling from the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 2016, she was initially hired by the DCF right out of graduate school on a $50,000 salary.
She left in 2018, around the same time her mother and maternal grandfather passed away, leaving her with a large inheritance speculated to be as much as $1 million.
It is unclear what exactly Hewitt was doing for around three years, until prosecutors say she began the fraud in December 2021 by registering an email domain – @masstate.us – intended to look like a legitimate Massachusetts DCF email.
She then allegedly created emails for two fake social workers who would claim to be working for her – Michael Kornetsky and Michelle Delfi.
Prosecutor Ashley Polin alleged in court that while ‘posing behind the keyboard as one of these DCF workers’, Hewitt ‘had herself admitted as a child patient at the Walden Behavioral treatment center and enrolled herself in the Boston Public Schools.’ The treatment center helped youngsters with eating disorders, with Hewitt having long-suffered anorexia.
From there, she quickly began attending classes at Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester, where she stayed for around seven months before transferring to Brighton High for two months.
Switching to the name Ellie Blake and claiming to be 13, her alleged con unraveled a week after she transferred to English High School in Boston. The scheme was busted after she complained about being bullied by actual-teenagers taunting her for looking like an adult.
At some point, Hewitt had also purchased a $350,000 apartment, paying for the property in cash rather than needing a mortgage.
Despite committing to the facade by even having braces put on her teeth, as well as regularly wearing baggy clothes and ponytails to give her a younger look, classmates ridiculed Hewitt for appearing to look more like their parents.
The school was predominantly black and Hispanic students, who reportedly told Hewitt, ‘White cracks early.’
Posing as fake social worker Michelle Delfi using the bogus Massachusetts state email Hewitt created, she emailed the school’s guidance counselor to notify them about the bullying she claimed Ellie was suffering.
‘Elle has a really bad day at school yesterday, cried all evening and doesn’t want to go back,’ the message said – with Hewitt allegedly writing about herself in the third person.
‘(Ellie) is really sensitive about people commenting on her face and how she looks older,’ Ms. ‘Delphi’ wrote. ‘It’s a huge trigger point for her.’
Delphi said that Ellie suffered from a genetic medical condition that prematurely aged her, and claimed she was a vulnerable victim of child trafficking that now lived with a foster family.
After school staff worked out a plan for her return, principal Caitlin Murphy realized certain aspects of the troubled student’s story didn’t add up – most notably, Delphi’s email domain didn’t match the correct DCF address.
In an email seen by the Boston Globe, Murphy urgently requested staff members ‘look at the documents that Ellie was registered with to be sure that we are confident that there is not something amiss here.’
‘Something feels like it’s not adding up,’ she wrote. They were later disturbed at being unable to find her birth certificate.
Claiming that her parents were dead, Hewitt was also able to enroll under a false identity at Walden Behavioral Care, which specializes in eating disorders.
At some stage, she began living with a social therapist at the center, Rebecca Bernat, and her partner John Smith, seemingly without documentation as the couple now claim they were duped along with everyone else.
Other classmates also claimed she exhibited strange behavior, including randomly bursting into tears in class and hallways, and driving herself to school while saying her family were so poor they were struggling for food.