A Michigan woman has been hit with felony charges amid accusations that she catfished and cyberbullied her own teenage daughter for an entire year.
Kendra Gail Licari, from Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, was charged earlier this week following a year-long investigation which began when Beal City Schools received a complaint about cyberbullying.
It was Licari's daughter, and the boy her daughter was seeing at the time, who were the victims of the harassment, so Licari worked with the boy's mother and school officials to figure out who could be behind it.
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Although the complaint didn't come until December, when Licari was working as a girls' basketball coach at her daughter's school, Isabella County Prosecutor David Barberi said the messages began in early 2021.
The incidents took place off school grounds and without the use of school devices, and before long district officials were out of resources to trace the culprit.
The district asked for assistance from law enforcement in January 2021, and by April even the FBI's computer crime division was involved.
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The federal agency was able to lock down the IP addresses used to send the messages, and realised they linked to Licari.
The mother is accused of having used virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide her location, Barberi explained, and even made it look like the messages were coming from areas where other teenagers were located.
She used slang and abbreviations to try and make it look like the messages were coming from another teen. The prosecutor's office compiled 349 pages of harassing text and social media messages.
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After she was tracked down, Licari was confronted and reportedly made a full confession about her actions. However, the reason she targeted her daughter remains unclear.
The 42-year-old mother was charged with two counts of stalking a minor, two counts of using a computer to commit a crime and one count of obstruction of justice. The latter charge alleges that the mother attempted to frame another minor for her actions during the investigation.
Licari was released on a $5,000 bond following the arraignment. She could face years behind bars, as using a computer to commit a crime is a 10-year felony, while stalking a minor and obstruction of justice are both five-year felonies.
Licari is scheduled to appear on 29 December for a hearing that will determine whether sufficient evidence exists to bind her over for trial.
Topics: Crime, US News, Technology
Emily Brown