A Michigan woman was arrested last week for a vicious online harassment campaign against her own daughter and another teen in what authorities described as a sophisticated catfishing scheme.
Kendra Gail Licari, 42, of Mount Pleasant, allegedly sent her daughter and the girl's boyfriend hundreds of disparaging and abusive texts and social media messages using virtual private networks to mask her location, the Mercury News reported.
At the time, Licari was a girls high school basketball coach at the school that her daughter attended.
Licari is 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, according to a criminal complaint.
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The court documents allege that Licari "attempted to frame another student for the crime during the stalking investigation."
The young girl and her then-boyfriend allegedly received up to a dozen harassing messages a day from Sept. 13, 2021 to Feb. 28, 2022 that appeared to come from a peer based on the use of slang and abbreviations, officials said.
The probe began after Licari reported the harassment to school authorities last December. Licari and her daughter's then-boyfriend's mother tried to work with school officials to identify the perpetrator.
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But Beal City Schools Superintendent William Chilman told Mercury News that they were limited in their investigation since most of the incidents took place off school grounds and didn't involve school devices. The district enlisted the help of police in mid-January.
"When the case first came into our office, it was bizarre and almost hard to believe," Isabella County prosecutor David Barberi told WKRC. "By and large it was mostly just harassing-type text messages, demeaning, demoralizing, and just mean texts."
But local police soon exhausted their resources and brought in the FBI in mid-April. The FBI was able to track down the IP addresses connected to the harassment, and they led back to Licari, Barberi said.
The mother was confronted with the allegation that she was behind onslaught of disparaging messages, and she allegedly made a full confession, the prosecutor said.
Officials didn't offer a motive for the bizarre conduct. Licari stopped working at the school before her role in the scheme was uncovered due to a staffing change, according to Chilman.
Licari, who faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of the top count, was released on a $5,000 bond after her arraignment on Dec. 12. She's due back in court for a hearing Dec. 29.
