A shocking incident involving a mother who secretly cyberbullied her own daughter for nearly a year is explored in a new documentary, capturing the moment when authorities confronted her.
In October 2020, Lauryn Licari, a 13-year-old from Michigan, along with her boyfriend Owen McKenny, began receiving troubling messages from an unidentified number.
The first message read, “Hi Lauryn, Owen is breaking up with you. He no longer likes you and hasn’t liked you for a while. It’s obvious he wants me. He laughs, smiles, and touches my hair.
“We are both down to f**k. You are a sweet girl, but I know I can give him what he wants, sorry not sorry.”
Initially, these strange texts stopped, but reappeared in September 2021. Over the following 15 months, the young couple endured a relentless stream of insults and threats.
The messages escalated in severity, targeting Lauryn’s looks and character, calling her derogatory names such as ‘ugly a**,’ ‘trash b**ch,’ and ‘anorexic flat a**.’
Some texts became alarmingly aggressive, suggesting self-harm with messages like: ‘Kill yourself now b***h’, ‘jump off a bridge’, ‘his life would be better if you were dead’, and ‘finish yourself or we will #bang’.
The personal nature of the messages, particularly those about Lauryn’s relationship with Owen, led her parents and school officials to suspect someone she knew. They sought law enforcement’s assistance to uncover the perpetrator, only to discover that it was Lauryn’s own mother behind the harassment.
The shocking revelation is detailed in the Netflix documentary, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, where the FBI traced the source of the messages back to Kendra Licari.
According to Isabella County Prosecutor David Barberi, Licari used virtual private networks (VPNs) to disguise her location, making it appear as though the messages, which filled 349 pages, were sent from areas populated by other teenagers.
Initially, the sheriff’s office suspected several classmates and friends due to the slang and abbreviations used in the texts, which seemed to mimic a teenager’s language, stirring suspicion within the community and straining relationships.
When police searched Licari’s home, she admitted to the harassment in front of a stunned Lauryn, with the confrontation captured on an officer’s bodycam.
Kendra faced multiple charges of stalking and using a computer to commit a crime. She pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor and received a sentence of 19 months to five years in prison, but was released on August 8 last year.
Currently, a court order prevents her from contacting her daughter. However, in the documentary, she expresses hope for reconciliation in the future.
“Every single one of us makes mistakes, not a single one of us has lived a perfect life, and realistically, a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught,” she stated in the documentary.
Licari provided some insight into her motivations, though Prosecutor Barberi speculated on a possible psychological condition like ‘cyber’ Munchausen syndrome by proxy, while emphasizing that this is not a formal medical diagnosis or justification for her actions.