During his time at Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Del., Wheeler was a member of the National Honor Society, earned himself a place in the top 10 percent of his class, and participated in the school’s marching band.

“He was a typical high school student, we’d say,” Fitzgerald said. “He was a good student. He fit in and had friends, but he didn’t do anything that really drew any attention to himself.”

Once Wheeler gained acceptance to Bowdoin College and graduated from Caesar Rodney in 2005, the school “kind of lost track of him,” Fitzgerald said. But in late April of this year, the former student’s name snuck back onto the radar: the high school received an inquiry from an admissions officer at Yale, who asked Caesar Rodney to verify data on Wheeler’s transfer application.

Red flags quickly appeared. Wheeler’s forms stated that he had graduated as valedictorian in 2007—clearly false, Fitzgerald said, since Wheeler did not rank first in his class and had graduated in the year 2005.

Wheeler’s application also listed Advanced Placement courses that had not been offered at Caesar Rodney during Wheeler’s time at the school and showcased perfect SAT scores. According to prosecutors, Wheeler took the SAT twice, achieving scores of 1160 and 1220.

“There was a series of e-mails that went back and forth that basically said, ‘No, these are not correct,’ and from that point, it became more complicated,” said Fitzgerald, who added that Caesar Rodney’s involvement in the Wheeler case did not extend beyond the school’s interactions with Yale. “The flags went up because, ‘Hey, there’s a problem here. This guy is trying to get away with something that’s wrong.’”

Fitzgerald said he believes that the Yale admissions office did not contact Caesar Rodney in April out of suspicion regarding the authenticity of Wheeler’s application, but to conduct a standard vetting procedure of applicants. But with the emergence of the various warning signs, the Yale admissions office contacted its counterpart at Harvard, which Wheeler had left in the fall of 2009 when faced with charges of academic dishonesty.

During his time in high school, there had been “no indication” that Wheeler had committed any form of academic dishonesty or fraud, Fitzgerald said. In fact, when the high school began to learn of the inconsistencies between the claims made in Wheeler’s transfer application and his actual time in high school, the initial concern on the minds of administrators at Caesar Rodney was the possibility that Wheeler was a victim of identity theft.

“That was our first reaction, that the Adam Wheeler that we’re seeing on this application does not fit the Adam Wheeler that we knew when he was in high school,” Fitzgerald said. It was only after the application had gone through a verification process that the high school “confirmed that that was our Adam Wheeler…It really seemed out of character for him.”

“He seems like a different person,” Fitzgerald added. “It’s just a sad case because who knows what demons drive individuals and what pressures he felt, and why in the world he tried to perpetrate the frauds that he did.”

—Esther I. Yi contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Xi Yu can be reached at xyu@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Julie M. Zauzmer can be reached at jzauzmer@college.harvard.edu.