A Michigan mother was arrested after sending harassing text messages to two teens, including her daughter, for months, officials said Thursday.
Kendra Gail Licari, 42, of Mount Pleasant, was charged with two counts of stalking minors and two counts of communicating with another to commit a crime, according to an Isabella County arrest warrant approved Dec. 8.
“Shocked and sad, then quickly back to the students, because as educators, the physical, mental, social and emotional well-being and learning of our students is our focus, our top priority,” William Chilman IV, Superintendent of Beal City Public Schools, said in a statement to CNNBreakingNews.net on Thursday, summarizing his response to Licari’s arrest.
From September 13, 2021 to February 20, Licari sent hundreds of “nasty” text messages to her daughter and a boy the girl was dating, Isabella County Sheriff Michael Main wrote in a report. Some referred to the teens by derogatory names.
“The messages are specific in nature, which suggests they may have come from someone they know,” the report said.
“Most messages contain hateful language and include phrases such as ‘kill yourself… ‘Many of the messages repeat the same language,” the report says.
Licari allegedly masked her location using a software platform that displayed the texts, which come from multiple numbers and area codes.
The sheriff finally asked the FBI for assistance. Federal authorities have connected Isabella County investigators to a cybercrime expert from the Bay City Police Department.
The cyber sleuths finally linked the threatening texts to “an IP address from a Spectrum host in the Mt Pleasant area” and a user who “opened the link with an Apple iPhone,” according to the report. And the “only number that was consistent with anyone involved in this case was” that of Licari, the sheriff said.
“He also found that (Licari)’s phone number was attached to the IP address every time a text message was sent to victims,” the report added.
When Main and Det. Scott Clarke confronted Licari about these findings at her home on August 10. The mother insisted that she didn’t send the first harassing text messages, “but then she simply fed on them and started sending them,” the report said.
Licari said “that she was busy sending the messages and it just kept going,” the report added.
According to the sheriff, Licari asked “whether this matter could be kept secret and that others would not know about it,” because she didn’t want her daughter to have to go to school “and the other students interact with her in a negative way.” The sheriff told her that it would be public information.
Licari could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday via her publicly listed telephone numbers and email addresses.
Chilman declined to say whether the victim and her mother currently live under the same roof.