During the summer of 2019, multiple LSU fraternity members grew suspicious of a new fraternity recruit who said his name was Crew Brooks and described himself as an incoming freshman interested in rushing. 

Communicating through Snapchat, Brooks asked members of multiple LSU fraternities if he’d be able to drink alcohol at various rush events he had been invited to and if he should bring a fake ID. Brooks, however, never actually showed up to any of the events he inquired about. 

In July, the Interfraternity Council, the governing body of LSU’s 15 frats, started receiving complaints from Brooks’ supposed mother, “Jenny Brooks,” who said fraternity members were trying to recruit her son with alcohol, a violation of LSU Greek Life policy and state drinking laws, given the recruit’s supposed age. 

Suspicious of the no-show recruit and why some of their parties were being shut down, the fraternity members contacted employees in the IFC office and asked them to verify whether Brooks was actually an incoming LSU freshman. 

The employees quickly discovered that Brooks’ information, including his LSU ID, in the IFC’s recruiting database had been fabricated, according to a former IFC employee who worked in the office at the time. They spoke to the Reveille on the condition of anonymity to avoid being identified by their former boss. 

The Reveille first broke the story about the fake recruit in September after obtaining a 2019 LSU Police report detailing an investigation into the matter. This story contains new information about the events that transpired inside the IFC office leading up to the LSUPD investigation and insight into how the university may have handled their own internal investigation into the fake accounts. 

LSU Police concluded that the then assistant director of Greek life, Donald Abels, was responsible for the fake profiles. According to their report, detectives tracked an IP address associated with the “Jenny Brooks” email account used to send fake complaints back to Abels’ iPhone.

“Detectives have concluded that the assistant director of Greek Life (Donald Abels) initiated a scheme (catfishing) to entrap fraternities in inappropriate behavior with recruits,” the police report, including the text in parentheses, says. “He used this information to reach out to fraternities and stop certain events from happening and/or circumventing the need for additional follow-up investigations.”

The detectives didn’t believe Abels broke any criminal laws though, so LSU Police referred the matter to the university for an internal investigation. The Reveille’s editor in chief has sued the university for the release of the internal investigation records. 

An email obtained by the Reveille through a public records request suggests that LSU didn’t find Abels responsible for the entrapment scheme detailed in the police report. Instead, Abels was “only guilty of sharing [his] password out of an attempt to help some of the guys [he] worked with,” according to an email from an LSU HR employee to Abels in August 2022.

Abels left LSU in 2021, two years after the LSUPD investigation, to become director of Greek life at Sewanee: University of the South, a private college in Tennessee. The full email suggests that LSU officials told Sewanee officials that they didn’t have any findings against Abels and that he left the university in good standing. 

The anonymous former IFC worker said that the LSU HR employee’s explanation “doesn’t make any sense,” given that IFC employees had their own login credentials; it doesn’t address the IP address associated with the fictitious mother tracked back to Abels’ iPhone; and it doesn’t explain who was responsible for the fake profiles if not Abels. 

Furthermore, according to the former IFC employee, when they and others in the office realized that someone had created a fake recruit in the database, they immediately became suspicious of Abels, who had been assistant director of Greek Life for two years at that point.

The former employee said that the IFC employees suspected Abels was responsible for the fake accounts for two reasons: He was one of two people validating recruit profiles in the IFC’s database. And just a few weeks earlier, he floated the idea of creating a fake profile to two IFC student workers in a private meeting, according to the former IFC employee. 

Abels wasn’t clear about why he wanted them to create the fake account or what it would be used for, the former IFC employee said. The IFC employees eventually confronted Abels, asking him directly if he had anything to do with the fake recruit. Abels denied it. 

Abels has denied multiple phone calls and emails from the Reveille. In an interview with Sewanee’s student newspaper, The Purple, Abels called the accusations in the 2019 LSU Police report “false.”