Unknown Number

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 (pseudonym for Lauren 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.”  The texter seemed to know a lot about what Ashley and Owen were doing at school. They knew what shirt Ashley was wearing on any given day and how many basketball points she had scored (“LMFAO 2 points u suck”). The bully knew Owen had removed the phone case Ashley had given him as a gift, and they tracked his whereabouts in class: “owen sitting by me in history sry not sry we fuckin take u down bitch.” They constantly changed numbers using burner apps. But Kendra and Jill had homed in on a possible suspect: Khloe Wilson, a popular freshman athlete who had played sports with Ashley since grade school. The previous night, a potential slip-up — the bully gloated in a text about scoring 12 points in the basketball game. At the sheriff’s urging, Kendra, who often ran varsity’s scoreboard, left the room to fetch the prior night’s record. Only Khloe had scored 12 points.  At a preliminary meeting with the sheriff’s department many weeks prior, a detective had asked Jill if she feared that her son’s mental state was bad enough that he might harm himself. She had watched Owen withering — talking back at home, looking miserable, pulling from a reserve of anger on the basketball court that she didn’t recognize. But harm himself? Thankfully not. And what about Ashley? Kendra didn’t speak. Jill recalls answering for her: “The answer is ‘yes,’ Kendra. We are afraid Ashley could hurt herself.” Back in the principal’s office, the sheriff said he’d start investigating, and the parents left the campus with renewed hope.  Beal City, a farming community with two pubs and one flashing intersection, seemed like the last place on earth anyone could hide. The landscape is open and flat, broken into well-tended fields and dairies, wind turbines churning overheard. Many of its families boast roots that stretch back generations. It’s a place where, as one local said, “you want to be perceived as a good person.” When a parent is diagnosed with cancer, you start a meal train and sell T-shirts that say NOBODY FIGHTS ALONE. You volunteer to ladle cheese onto nachos at the stadium concessions to help the Sports Boosters and send your kid to practice with extra cleats for the boy who needs some. The heart of town is its prized public school: a single brown-brick complex, K-12, with just 50 students per grade, a foyer decked in sports-championship trophies, and a mural chirping CHARACTER COUNTS!  The parents wanted the cyberbully to be outed and expelled. Most important, they wanted their happy, carefree children back. No one could have imagined that the hunt would stretch on eight more exasperating months. Or that, on that January afternoon at Beal City High, the bully had been sitting in the room. 

In the fall of seventh grade, Owen sent Ashley an Instagram DM. He had gotten his first cell phone only that year, one of the last kids in his grade without one. (“We’re those parents,” his mother said.) Ashley, a softball and basketball player in his class, was delicately slim, tomboyish in hoodies and jerseys, her blonde hair sometimes braided in an arch over her crown. “She stood out,” Owen remembered. “Pretty, athletic, super-kind.” With classic seventh-grade diplomacy, Owen h…