The Week in “Alums”
A curious mention of a Columbia “alum” in the news today in the form of a police report. High school dropout and apparent puppy enthusiast Esther Reed stole the identity of a missing South Carolina woman named Brooke Henson. Using Henson’s name and personal information, Reed took her SATs and GED and gained entrance to Harvard and Columbia.
Reed dropped out of school and was on the lam for more than a year before she was arrested on Saturday on charges of fraud and identity theft. Henson—who has been missing for nearly eight years—is still missing.
While at Columbia, Reed is believed to have nabbed $100 grand of financial aid. CU administration has admitted that she was enrolled up until last year, but did not provide any details.
Did you know Brooke Henson/Esther Reed or know any details of her time at Columbia? Let us know, email bwog@columbia.edu
Tags: alumni, crime
4 February 2008 @ 12:40 PM · 35 comments
on 
For the first time in ages, Ivygate actually beat you to a story. Get your troops together.
This is the coolest thing I have ever heard.
This was here last year. Or it was on the news.
Do we know whether she attended the College or GS? Since the story first broke my sense has been the latter — or maybe even Continuing Education. But the claim that she got so much financial aid is a new one on me and suggests that she was in the College, since so much aid would have been hard to come by in the other divisions.
Also, BWOG, you misspelled “Alums” in the headline. Please be more careful with my name from now on.
I’m somewhat confused. Did she use the stolen identity to take the exams, or did she also steal the exam scores?
from other articles, it appears as though she faked the exam scores – which, from what I remember of the SAT process seems even more impressive.
At least she’s wearing columbia blue instead of crimson in the picture. Atta girl!
Then again, we did give her $100K.
totally gonna kill that puppy. And then steal its identity.
that puppy is ridiculously adorable
you know i wouldn’t complain if bwog decided to put up a bunch of pictures of yorkies or some similarly cute pup up
and acknowledge that the puppy is way cute.
She took the GED and SAT herself under the stolen name and was a student in GS. Let’s see if I can link to the info…
http://www.amw.com/pdf/indictment.pdf
Thanks for linking to the indictment. The charges say that she intended to obtain over $100K in financial aid, but not that she actually received that much. It also seems to say most of the aid she received was in the form of external loans rather than CU grants. That helps explain how she got so much aid at GS.
this still doesn’t explain why she couldn’t use her own identity???
I’d guess because she was getting financial aid checks that she was planning to run out on. Cash, vanish.
Haha. No. Those checks are applied to your tuition bill immediately. You don’t get to actually hold the cash.
Probably because she would not have been admitted. I gather that she was either a HS dropout or at least poor student.
The article actually says she was a dropout; I didn’t think to re-read it until after I’d submitted my last post.
according to the article, she did take her SATs and GED’s before getting admitted.
Interestingly, Frank Abagnale chose to forge a Columbia degree. So it’s not just Barnard then? *zing*
Yes, but she got in without revealing her actual high school record. Presumably the credentials she showed the admissions office under her assumed identity were better than the ones she could have shown with her real name.
Very strange. The only thing stranger would be if she had gone to high school under an alias, become valedictorian, etc…
She’s clearly very clever, albeit in a slightly devious way. I say they should have let her stay. She could have been Columbia’s next Frank Abagnale.
so did she choose us over harvard?
this only adds to the theory that GS is the back door to columbia…
considering what comes through the front door to columbia, I’m not sure if that’s really a big deal.
so true!
If you she killed person whose identity she stole?
i really don’t get it…
i can understand some kind of identity theft scheme for financial gain… but seriously, earning a college degree in someone else’s name? what’s the point? if you want that degree to mean anything, you’re going to have to pay back the loans…
unless her time here was, uh, anthropological in nature. perhaps she had always wondered what these sorts of places are like…
or perhaps she killed the other girl and was just operating in autopilot fantasyland, living it up in morningside heights. (although to be honest with you, if i was a murderer on the run, operating on stolen identity cash, i certainly wouldn’t be hanging out in butler. c’mon!)
sadly, identity theft is probably the only way to get any meaningful financial support in gs, regardless of academic performance. :/
“if i was a murderer on the run, operating on stolen identity cash, i certainly wouldn’t be hanging out in butler…”
Why not? Butler has its fair share of suspicious individuals.
didn’t this happen last year? why is this news?
was arrested saturday. that is the news. and some potential gossip on what was the point of her batshit insane identity theft scheme.
puppy is a shih tzu. they are so goddamn cute as kids. then they grow out their hair and become dandies. it’s really gross.
Are people awaiting trial allowed to sign book contracts?
Actually, there was a law passed in the 1970s prohibiting criminals from gaining profit from their crimes through books, movies, etc. (FYI – it wasn’t a retroactive law — Frank Lucas — of American Gangster — committed his crimes prior to the law’s inception and sold his story years later for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Was that the Son of Sam law?
There was also some talk of her being a spy for some terrorist sect or something, or trying to seduce a West Point student to get military secrets…
Brooke was in my University Writing class freshman year! She was always pretty sweet. Quite frankly, meeting a con artist was probably the only good thing about Uni writing…