A Michigan woman was arrested after she sent months of harassing text messages to two teenagers, including her daughter, officials said Thursday.
Kendra Gail Licari, 42, of Mount Pleasant, was charged with two counts of stalking a minor and two counts of communicating with another to commit a crime, according to an Isabella County arrest warrant authorized Dec. 8.
“Shocked and saddened, then quickly back to the students, because as educators, our students’ physical, mental, social and emotional well-being and learning is our focus, our No. 1 priority,” Beal City Public Schools Superintendent William Chilman IV told NBC News in a statement Thursday, summing up his reaction to Licari’s arrest.
From Sept. 13, 2021, to Feb. 20, Licari sent hundreds of “mean” text messages to her daughter and a boy she had been dating, Isabella County Sheriff Michael Main wrote in a report. Some referred to the teens by derogatory names.
“The messages are specific in nature indicating that they may be from someone who they know,” according to the report.
“Most messages contain hateful speech and contain language like, ‘kill yourself …’ A lot of the messages repeat this same language,” the report said.
Licari is alleged to have masked her location with a software platform that showed the texts coming from multiple numbers and area codes.
The sheriff eventually reached out to the FBI for assistance. Federal authorities linked Isabella County investigators with a cybercrimes expert with the Bay City Police Department.
The cyber sleuths eventually connected the threatening texts to “an IP address from a Spectrum host from the Mt Pleasant area” and a user who “opened the link with an Apple Iphone,” according to the report. And the “only number that matched anyone involved in this case was” Licari’s, Main said.
“He also found that [Licari’s] phone number was attached to the IP address each time a text message was sent to the victims,” the report added.
When Main and Detective Scott Clarke confronted Licari with the findings at her home Aug. 10, she insisted she hadn’t sent the early harassing text messages “but then she just fed off from it and began to send them,” according to the report.
Licari said that “she got caught up in sending the messages and it just continued,” the report added.
According to the sheriff, Licari asked “if this matter could be kept quiet and that others not find out about it,” because she didn’t want her daughter to have to go to school “and have the other students interact negatively with her.” Main told her it would be public information.
Licari could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday at her publicly listed phone numbers and email addresses.
Chilman declined to say whether the victim and her mother currently live under the same roof.
The stalking counts carry a maximum penalty of five years behind bars and the computer counts up to 10 years in prison.
Madelyn Urabe contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
