Five students at a Massachusetts Christian college made their first court appearances on Thursday, accused of luring an Army soldier onto their campus using a dating app and attacking him in a “To Catch a Predator” TikTok trend.
The Assumption University students were arraigned on conspiracy and kidnapping charges in Worcester District Court on Thursday. Automatic not-guilty pleas were entered for Easton Randall, 19; Kevin Carroll, 18; Isabella Trudeau, 18; Joaquin Smith, 18; and 18-year-old Kelsy Brainard, whose Tinder account was used to lure the 22-year-old Army soldier.
They are scheduled to appear again on March 28, according to online court records. A sixth student, a juvenile, has also been charged.
A relative of the victim told Fox News Digital that the 22-year-old deployed to the Middle East soon after the harrowing incident.
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The unassuming man was in Worcester attending his grandmother’s funeral on Oct. 1 before he agreed to meet with Brainard on Tinder that evening, he told police. The soldier later told Assumption University police that they “were going to try to hook up,” and that he “just wanted to be around people that were happy” after the burial service.
Based on the messages he exchanged with Brainard on the app and shared with police and Brainard’s profile, which indicated that she was 18, there was “absolutely no evidence presented to indicate that [the victim] was seeking sexual relationships with underage girls” and was “using Tinder as it was originally designed … to initiate a hookup,” police wrote in charging documents obtained by Fox News Digital.
A “mass” of 25 to 30 people emerged just minutes after the victim met Brainard, calling him a “pedophile” who “liked having sex with 17-year-old girls.” Before he was surrounded, the victim was sitting beside Brainard watching a game in a student lounge, and surveillance footage showed that they had “ample personal space between them,” and Brainard was “laughing and smiling.”
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Surveillance footage showed the group encircling the victim and preventing him from leaving around 10:30 p.m., police wrote. The victim was able to break free, but he was chased by the “crowd that can clearly be seen using their phones to record the pursuit.”
Police said the soldier was punched in the back of the head by a juvenile student who was not named in court documents, due to his age. Then Carroll slammed the victim’s head in his car door, according to court documents, and students kicked the victim’s vehicle as he rushed out of the parking lot.
Carroll is facing an additional charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, according to court documents.
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A few minutes later, the group can be seen on surveillance footage re-entering the building while laughing and “high-fiving” each other, police wrote.
Campus police became aware of the incident after Brainard reported “that a creepy guy came to campus looking to meet an underage girl.” She said that she had texted Randall, who “came down [into the lounge] to help [her] with a sexual predator.”
Although she said she met the “creepy” man on Tinder, she claimed that he “came [to campus] uninvited.”
Campus police were unable to find the alleged predator on campus, but they began reviewing security footage and interviewing students after they were contacted by Worcester Police about a man reporting an assault that took place at Assumption University.
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Further investigation revealed that “a small subset of the larger group” – the students now facing criminal charges – allegedly “conspired with each other to lure the victim to the property and solicited assistance ‘to catch a predator’ via group texts.”
“The goal of the Tinder invite was to simulate the TikTok fad of luring a sexual predator to a location and subsequently physically assaulting him or calling police,” according to court documents.
The accused students were all sitting together when Brainard was sending Tinder messages back and forth with the victim “when the idea of Catch a Predator came to mind,” Randall later told police.
“They all made suggestions and agreed what was texted to [the victim] and … the others joined the conspiracy knowing of the unlawful plan.”
Randall told campus police that “Catch a Predator was a big thing on TikTok currently, but that this got out of hand and went bad,” police wrote.
When the victim came to campus, one of the men simply texted the group chat that they “[had] to come down here” because they were “catching a predator,” which provoked a “rabid” response from the students, according to court records.
Brainard diminished her responsibility, records show, telling campus police that she “didn’t know what was going to happen” when confronted about the falsification. But police wrote that she was seen laughing and smiling on surveillance footage as the male students descended upon her Tinder match.
Attorneys representing the six students did not return Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
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