In 2019, LSU Police concluded that the university’s then assistant director of Greek Life, Donald Abels, was creating fake fraternity recruit profiles to entrap fraternity members in university policy violations and state drinking laws, a police report obtained by The Reveille reveals.
No criminal laws were broken, however, so LSU Police referred the matter to an internal investigation. LSU denied The Reveille’s request for records related to the internal investigation, citing privacy interests.
“The Greek Life office will not be providing comments on this matter,” LSU Greek Life Director Shawnna Ebhard-Smith said in response to The Reveille’s request for an interview.
Abels left LSU in August 2021, two years after the initial incident.
The accusations against Abels are now resurfacing at his new university, Sewanee: The University of the South, a small liberal arts college in Tennessee, where Abels is the director of Greek Life. The LSU Police report began circulating among students after Sewanees’ oldest sorority was suspended under Abels’ leadership.
The Reveille called Abels several times but couldn’t get in touch. However, in an interview with Sewanee’s student newspaper, The Sewanee Purple, Abels denied the findings of the LSU Police report, calling them false. He said that he left LSU in good standing.
Abels told The Sewanee Purple that he didn’t inform Sewanee administrators about the LSUPD investigation during his hiring process.
“There was nothing to share,” Abels said.
In response to the circulating accusations about Abels, Sewanee sent the following email to students:
“Members of the University’s administration were sent an email making allegations about a current University employee, Donald Abels, Director of Greek Life, concerning his behavior while he was an employee at another institution. A thorough review of the allegations raised in the communications to the University has been conducted and found the allegations to be unfounded. The former institution confirmed that Mr. Abels left in good standing.”
The Sewanee Purple also contacted LSU Police detective John Meliet, who wrote the 12-page police report.
“Everything I wrote in my report is accurate,” Meliet told The Purple. Citing LSU policy, he declined further comment.
The Report
On Aug. 19, 2019, LSU’s Interfraternity Council contacted LSU Police concerned that the online program they use to recruit new fraternity members had been hacked.
IFC administrators told LSU Police that a new recruit named “Crew Brooks” had enrolled in their online recruiting program. The narrative Meliot wrote in his report for LSU Police said as follows:
After fraternity members began contacting Crew Brooks and inviting him to various events, the IFC started receiving complaints from “Jenny Brooks,” the supposed mother of Crew Brooks, saying that LSU fraternity members had been contacting her child and attempting to recruit him with alcohol.
The IFC soon discovered that all of Crew Brooks’ information had been fabricated, including his LSU ID number. They also found fake social media accounts tied to Crew Brooks that were soon deleted around the time of the discovery.
“It appears that the person pretending to be Crew Brooks had modified the intellectual property of IFC and [the online recruiting program] to obtain information pertaining to fraternities on campus and possibly entrap them in criminal or policy violations by utilizing the email of [Jenny Brooks] to make complaints,” the police report said.
Police concluded that Crew Brooks was communicating with fraternity members via Snapchat and soliciting them to commit crimes that violate LSU policy, such as fake ID’s and underage drinking.
Since IFC administrators still at this point believed that they were being hacked, potentially by an LSU student, the university’s Office of Student Advocacy and Accountability was involved. Jonathan Sanders and Chelsie Bickel, then administrators in the office, told LSU Police that Abels had been forwarding them the complaints from Jenny Brooks.
Detectives later learned from an employee at Interactive Collegiate Solutions, the owner of the recruiting software, that someone with LSU credentials created the fake recruit.
On Aug. 28, detectives interviewed Abels, eventually confronting him, saying that it was possible he created the fake recruit, according to the police report. Abels denied it.
The Interactive Collegiate Solutions employee was also able to give detectives the IP address of whoever was using the recruitment program around the time that Crew Brooks’ classification in the system was moved over from a “recruit” to “potential member.” One of the IP addresses belonged to Abels’ laptop.
Detectives also subpoenaed Microsoft to find the IP address connected to Jenny Brooks’ email. Only one device was associated with that IP address: an iphone with the name “Donalds-iPhone,” associated with Abels.
Detectives noted in their report that Abels was unable to give any explanation as to why the IP addresses associated with the fake accounts traced back to his devices. Still, Abels denied wrongdoing and insisted he left LSU in good standing.
“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 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.”
