A Michigan mother engaged in the unthinkable process of systematically bullying her daughter online for a year.
As per reports, Lauryn Licari, of Beal City, Michigan, began receiving cruel and menacing texts in 2021. The messages, from an anonymous source, were threatening enough that Lauryn grew seriously worried.
Things quickly escalated as Lauryn’s boyfriend, Owen Kenny, became a target for the ominous messages too. The pair were harassed for an entire year, with their unknown tormenter also taking to social media to ensure they got no respite.
Ultimately the situation grew so intense that Lauryn and Owen involved the authorities in an attempt to resolve it. As part of the effort to catch the anonymous stalker, Lauryn’s mother, Kendra Licari, and Owen’s mother collaborated with school officials and law enforcement.
No one was rightly prepared for what the investigation would uncover, however.
In the end, it was revealed that Kendra – Lauryn’s mother – was behind the campaign of menacing messages. Authorities discovered that she had been using a VPN to hide her location, though the FBI were able to track the IP addresses.
Kendra made a full confession upon her arrest in 2023, pleading guilty to two counts of stalking a minor. She was handed a maximum sentence of five years, though was later released in August 2024.
At sentencing, Judge Mark Duthie told the court that the case had shown in the “worst in human nature”.
“I can’t imagine any parent saying such horrible things to her own daughter,” he told Kendra.
The unsettling – and downright bizarre – events have been brought to the fore recently by Netflix’s documentary series: Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.
The program details a number of the messages Lauryn received from her mother during the year that the harassment was taking place.
One such text read: “He thinks you’re ugly”, referring to Owen, while another told Lauryn: “You’re worthless” and “He thinks you’re trash”.
Some of the further messages included sexually explicit terms, reading that they wanted to “bang” Owen and telling Lauryn that Owen didn’t want her and that they were “both down to f***”.
“They were vulgar and nasty enough to make a 53-year-old man blush,” Superintendent Bill Chillan said. “The evidence was extraordinary.”
From there, the messages took on a progressively darker tone, with Lauryn receiving messages alluding to physical harm, including one that suggested she take her own life.
“When I first read that, I was totally in shock, it made me feel bad, I was in a bad mental state,” Lauryn said.
Kendra, meanwhile, revealed in the documentary that she “didn’t know how to stop” once she had started.
“I started in the thoughts of needing some answers, and then I just kept going, it was a spiral, kind of a snowball effect, I don’t think I knew how to stop,” the mom revealed.
“I was somebody different in those moments. I was in an awful place mentally. It was like I had a mask on or something, I didn’t even know who I was.”
According to her plea deal, Kendra is not able to see her daughter. In the Netflix documentary, Lauryn said she wants to see her mom “when the time is right.”
“I think I want to trust her now, but I don’t think I can,” Lauryn can he head saying. “Now that she’s out, I just want her to get the help she needs so then when we see each other, it doesn’t go back to the old ways and how it was before.”
Can you imagine being subjected to such abuse by your own mother? How would you react? Let us know in the comments.
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