14 DAY TRIAL // A 34-year-old woman was arrested by Longview, Texas, police on Monday night after officers discovered she was posing as a high school student.
Charity Anne Johnson was using the name “Charity Stevens” and pretended to be a 15-year-old orphan. She enrolled at New Life Christian School in Longview in October 2013, when she showed up accompanied by a guardian, and she was registered as a sophomore.
When she enrolled, Johnson told school's officials her birth date was November 24, 1997, and claimed she was a home-school student with no prior transcripts.
Police was reportedly alerted to the alleged fraud by a woman named Tamica Lincoln, who received Johnson into her house in March. The two women met while working at a McDonald's together, but Lincoln became suspicious of Johnson's identity and said she believed she was lying about her age.
Moreover, the woman claimed she was fooled into letting Johnson move into her home with a cleverly fabricated story. The fake tenth-grader reportedly told her that she was 15 and needed a place to live after her parents had died.
“I sympathized with her, and invited her into my home. I took her in as a child, did her hair, got her clothes and shoes,” Lincoln told a local news station, according to International Business Times.
She said Johnson also claimed she had been abused by her biological father, who had since died along with her mother. After taking on the role of her guardian, Lincoln did what any other parent would do, and she even met with Johnson's 10th-grade teachers to discuss her progress in school.
“I just don't know why she did it. Why put yourself and others at risk to do something like this? I have deep concerns about her being who we don't know she is, and then she's out there at the school,” the fooled woman added.
Investigators discovered that Johnson used a fake ID to enroll at the school, and she even had a fake Facebook account. Lincoln said everyone who knew the fake student were shocked when they found out she wasn't who she pretended to be.
“Teachers were crying and students were crying, and her best friend just couldn't believe it,” she said.
The bogus teenager was arrested on charges of failure to identify and giving false fictitious information and brought to Gregg County Jail, where she remains on a $500 (€365) bond.
It is unknown why Johnson decided to con Lincoln or the school.