Five Massachusetts college students are scheduled to make their first court appearance Thursday, accused of plotting to lure a man to campus via a dating app last fall and then grab him as part of a “Catch a Predator” trend on TikTok.
The students, all teenagers from Assumption University, a private Roman Catholic school in Worcester, are arraigned conspiracy and kidnapping at Worcester District Court.
One of the students, a woman who texted with the man on Tinder, is also accused of witness intimidation. A male student from the group is also charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. A sixth student was charged as a minor whose information is confidential.
The man — a 22-year-old active-duty soldier — told police he was in town for his grandmother’s funeral in October and “just wanted to be around happy people,” according to a campus police report. He said a student whose Tinder profile said she was 18 invited him over and led him to 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 to have sex with 17-year-old girls, the report said.
The man told police he broke free and was chased to his car by at least 25 people, where he was hit in the head and the car door was slammed on him. He fled and called the city police.
Campus surveillance video shows a large group of students, including the woman, “all with their cell phones off, in what appears to be a recording of the entire episode,” the police statement said. They are seen “laughing and high-fiving each other” in what appeared to be “a deliberately staged event,” and there was no evidence to indicate the man sought sexual relations with underage girls, the police report said.
After the assault, the woman, who is 18, 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 male friend who chased him away. All of this was false, campus police concluded after reviewing surveillance recordings and determining that “first person perspective videos” were circulating among students.