NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — The mystery of a 29-year-old woman posing as a teenager to enroll in a New Jersey high school seems to have captured the nation’s imagination, drawing millions of viewers to the news articles, TikTok and YouTube.
Parents questioned how easily she seemed to trick school officials and was able to roam the hallways, attend classes and meet with guidance counselors for four days in January. . Students at the school, New Brunswick High, said they feared that the woman, Hyejeong Shin, had ill intentions, possibly being a criminal after she tried to set up meetings with them at a location outside of school.
But on Monday, two lawyers hired by her family offered a much less sinister explanation for the odd behavior: Freshly divorced and away from her family in South Korea, she’s trying to recreate the feeling. security she felt as a student at the university. a Massachusetts boarding school.
“It’s weird,” Darren M. Gelber, one of the attorneys, said in an interview. “And people can be difficult to understand.”
“There are personal issues that she needs to deal with,” added Henry Hong Jung, another lawyer. “She’s been away from home for a long time.”
On Monday, at her second court appearance, she pleaded not guilty to charges that a prosecutor said carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Her lawyers told the judge she plans to apply to a program that diverts first-time offenders from the criminal justice system and allows them to have their records wiped after a probationary period. success.
Her lawyer said that Ms. Shin, who is not a US citizen but is legally in the country, hopes to return to her home in South Korea once the case is over.
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“I have nothing to say right now,” Ms. Shin, wearing a blazer and blue jeans, with her dark hair tied in a ponytail, said after the trial.
Within weeks of Ms. Shin’s arrest on January 24 for allegedly providing school officials with documents that falsified her age, police in New Brunswick had reassured parents that no there is no evidence that she intended to “cause harm or violence to students, staff, or faculty.”
However, plotting around a motive can last.
Ms. Shin lives in a high-rise apartment building near Rutgers University, about 3 miles from the 2,400-student school where she pretends to be a student.
A university spokeswoman said she graduated from Rutgers in 2019 with a degree in political science and Chinese. She took classes for a master’s degree but was not employed after what Mr Jung described as “a bitter divorce”.
In 2022, her landlord filed a lawsuit after she was late in paying about $20,000 in rent, court records show. Mr Gelber said that debt could be related to her divorce, which was finalized about two years ago.
Neither Aubrey A. Johnson, the superintendent of schools in New Brunswick, nor his spokesman responded to messages on Monday. But Mr. Johnson did say the district would evaluate “better ways to find fake documents and other things.”
New Jersey schools must temporarily enroll all children, even if no records are normally provided to verify identity or prove they live in the community. From that point on, students have 30 days to provide additional proof of identity or the district has the option of declaring them ineligible for class, according to the superintendent.
Shin first came to the United States at the age of 16 to attend a boarding school in Massachusetts, Gelber said.
“This whole case is about my client’s desire to return to a place of safety and welcome in an environment that she looks back on with love – and nothing more,” he said. .”
“I am not a psychologist,” he added, “but being separated from her family and being in another country – as well as a few other stressors in her life – could have makes her act very unusual.”
He said that Ms. Shin had been an “excellent” student at Rutgers.
At her alma mater, she was named a academic community learning in 2017. At the time, she said her main academic interests were languages and linguistics and their influence on “human identity and culture”.
According to a website devoted to the scholar’s program, she practices meditation and enjoys singing “when there’s no one around.”
“I can be very quiet, but I gradually opened up and started talking more as I felt more comfortable,” she wrote.
In court on Monday, Ms. Shin was interviewed by law enforcement officers who screen candidates for the pre-trial intervention program; She will return to court on May 15.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
