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NewsvineAlthough Azia Kim and Elizabeth Okazaki might have campuswide name recognition for their extended and uninvited stints on campus, they’re hardly the first people to deceive their way onto the nation’s top campuses, and they wreaked relatively little havoc compared to some others who have had more sinister intentions at other places.
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In 1997, Yale admitted graduate student Tonica Tonise Martin from Cuyahoga Community College and Ohio’s Central University with a stellar transcript and impressive letters of recommendation, according to The Yale Daily News. Or so, they thought. After a series of fishy stories unraveled, Martin was charged with defrauding Yale of her scholarship money and cut a plea bargain for two years of probation.
But the story grew darker. After being booked on drug charges for attempting to buy cocaine, Martin left jail on bail and kidnapped a woman resembling herself, planning to murder her and steal her identity. The intended victim escaped, and Martin was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Other impostors, like Okazaki, may have been on campus legitimately at one point, but either overstayed their welcome or pretended to be people they were not.
At Harvard, three students in a continuing education program have independently posed as undergraduates over the last eight years. According to The Harvard Crimson, all three took active part in undergraduate life, attending parties and joining student groups. One, Edward Meinart, joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, whose members described him as a model pledge. A month after he was exposed in 1999, he pled guilty to check fraud.
And at least one imposter claims to have done it just to make his parents happy.
David Javani Vanegas pretended to be a student at Houston’s Rice University for over a year, sleeping in people’s rooms and eating dining hall food, confident that at most he would incur trespassing charges.
“[Vanegas] said that he applied to Rice and was accepted but couldn’t attend,” Rice University Sergeant Gary Spears told The Rice Thresher. “He said that it would break his mother’s heart if he didn’t attend Rice, so he carried out this ruse for three semesters, showing up here every day.”