A Michigan mother has finally explained why she harassed and stalked her 13-year-old daughter for over a year.

In 2021, Lauryn Licari began receiving numerous anonymous and threatening messages. Her then-boyfriend, Owen McKenny, was also a target. For the next year, Lauryn and Owen received text messages from an unknown number, along with threatening social media messages from someone who claimed to be their age. According to Cosmopolitan, they sometimes received up to a dozen messages a day.

To find the culprit, Lauryn's mother, Kendra Licari, and Owen's mother worked with school officials and law enforcement in Beal City, Michigan. The FBI was eventually brought in and discovered that Kendra was behind the harassment. The investigation revealed that the mother had used a VPN (virtual private network) to hide her location. However, the FBI was able to trace all the IP addresses back to Licari.

She was arrested and initially blamed one of the teenagers but later confessed. In 2023, Licari pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor and was sentenced to a maximum of five years. According to Today, she was released in August 2024 and is not allowed to see her daughter due to her plea deal. At the time of her arrest, she never explained her motives until her appearance in the new Netflix documentary series, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.

In the documentary, Licari insists she did not send the initial messages to her daughter, which warned that Owen was going to break up with her. She claims she only sent the subsequent messages in an attempt to figure out who was behind the harassment.

She said, "The messages stopped for a little bit, and then they picked back up. In my mind, I'm like, 'How long do we let this go on? What do I do as a parent?' I really wanted to get to the bottom of who it was. And that's when I started sending the text messages to Lauryn and Owen."

Kendra claimed her goal was that the teenagers would talk to their friends about the messages, and "something might come up that could help pinpoint where they were originating from." She also said that once she began, she "didn't know how to stop."

"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," she admitted. "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."

Licari has previously expressed remorse for her actions. In the documentary, she states that she is very "disappointed" in herself and feels she has let herself and her family down.

Meanwhile, Lauryn described feeling conflicted, as she has lost trust in her mother but also misses her.

She said, "Being without that relationship, I think, is really hurting me, and I think rebuilding our relationship will help both of us a lot. I love her more than anything."