A woman who fabricated an elaborate story about a non-existent soldier in Iraq may have embarrassed the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University Carbondaale, but she apparently didn’t break any laws there.
That’s the conclusion of a prosecutor in Carbondale, who said Monday he would pass on pursuing any criminal charges against Jaimie Reynolds. Reynolds is the Marion, Ill., woman who has admitted she made up the story of a little girl whose published letters to her father overseas riveted readers of the campus newspaper The Daily Egyptian for two years.
“I can’t see a crime here,” Jackson County State’s Attorney Michael Wepsiec said Monday after reviewing a report from the SIUC campus police department compiled on the hoax after Reynolds’ story finally collapsed this summer.
The Daily Egyptian first wrote in 2003 about 8-year-old Kodee Kennings’ struggle to deal with her father’s departure to Iraq. Reynolds, going by the name Colleen Hastings, presented the girl as her niece, and they both became close friends with students and faculty at the newspaper. Over the next two years, the paper published stories about, and columns by, “Kodee.”
When confronted after the hoax was exposed, Reynolds told reporters she carried it out to help the career of a friend on the campus newspaper staff. That friend, former student editor Michael Brenner, vehemently denies he was in on the scheme and maintains he was among those Reynolds duped with the story.
Wepsiec, the state’s attorney, said Monday his review of the police report on the incident focused on the question of “whether there was any money involved” in the hoax, which could have elevated it to criminal fraud.
SIUC’s School of Journalism is reviewing the incident, but director Walter Jaehnig said Monday there had been no disciplinary action of any student or faculty member in connection with the hoax.
(c) 2005, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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