The Unknowun Number

Who was the relentless, vicious bully harassing Kendra Licari's teenage daughter?

- Lauren Smiley

One afternoon in January 2022, the parents of two freshmen at Beal City High School in central Michigan gathered in the principal’s office. They were there to discuss the texts: vicious, anonymous messages flooding the phones of their children, Ashley Licari and Owen McKenny, sometimes 30 a day. The messages would arrive at any hour, and no one knew who was sending them.

Although they were sent to both Ashley and Owen, they mostly targeted Ashley. The cyberbully seemed to know exactly how to pick at her insecurities. The texts mocked her thin frame, calling her an “anorexic toddler” with a “little tykes body,” and slammed her ability on the basketball court. Ashley and Owen dated in middle school but had broken up in the fall of freshman year, and the bully told Ashley that Owen was now trashing her behind her back and flirting with other girls. The bully described in detail the sexual moves they would do with him. One message included a homecoming photo of Ashley with a vomiting emoji pasted over her head and the words skank and hoe plastered in red on her body. In a group thread, the texter asked Owen to help take Ashley down and told her that Owen had “said his life would be better if you were dead” and “no one will care if u gone.”

At the meeting, Ashley’s mother, Kendra Licari, couldn’t stop crying. The superintendent and sheriff were there, too, but Owen’s mother, Jill McKenny, did much of the talking. She hoisted hundreds of pages of text transcripts from a Staples box and passed them around. The sheriff thumbed through the pages. Ashley sometimes texted back feistily, but at other points she would plead, “I honestly can not take anymore and will do anything you want if you will please stop.”