Five Massachusetts college students are scheduled to make their first appearances in court Thursday, accused of plotting to lure a man through a dating app into visiting campus last fall and then seizing him as part of a “Catch a Predator” trend on TikTok.
The students, all teens at Assumption University, a private, Roman Catholic school in Worcester, face arraignment on conspiracy and kidnapping charges in Worcester District Court.
One of the students, a woman who texted with the man on Tinder, also faces a charge of witness intimidation. A male student in the group also faces a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. A sixth student was charged as a juvenile whose records are confidential.
The man — a 22-year-old active-duty military service member — told police that he was in town for his grandmother’s funeral in October and “just wanted to be around people that were happy,” according to a campus police report. He said a student whose Tinder profile said she was 18 invited him over and led him into 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 sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report.
The man told police that he broke free and was chased by at least 25 people to his car, where he was punched in the head and his car door was slammed on him. He fled and called city police.
Campus surveillance video shows a large group of students, including the woman, “all with their cellphones out in what seems to be a recording of the whole episode,” the police statement said. They are seen “laughing and high fiving with each other” in what appeared to be “a deliberately staged event,” and there was no evidence to indicate the man was seeking 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 frightened by him. She said he had come to campus uninvited and that she texted a male friend who chased him away. All of this was false, campus police concluded after reviewing surveillance recordings and finding that “first person perspective videos” were being circulated among students.