Unknown Number: The High School Catfish

- Close it? - Yeah.

Perfect.

My name's Lauryn Licari.

I grew up in Beal City, Michigan.

Beal City is so extremely small. There's one stoplight and two bars.

I go to Beal City High School.

It's a really small school in a small area,

and everybody knows everybody.

My name is Sophie Weber.

I go to Beal City High School with Owen and Macy and Lauryn.

There's nothing in the area to do

besides walk around the small town.

No one really has anything better to do than talk about other people.

Like, even the parents.

Like, they talk about what us teenagers are doing,

and I feel like that's kind of a toxic thing that just gets passed down.

A lot of people spend up to 13 hours on their phone a day,

which I think is a little bit, like, excessive.

I really like going on my phone.

I love going on TikTok and Snapchat.

I love texting my friends.

It's kind of the only way that people communicate now,

like, is with their phones.

Go, little mama, shake it fast...

I was 13 years old when I got my first phone.

Everyone else had a phone, you know? I just... I wanted to fit in.

I was getting to that age where, like, social media was becoming popular,

and I just wanted to be cool, you know?

Your phone can be a good thing to, like, communicate with your friends,

but it could definitely be a way that something dangerous could happen.

It's crazy how having a phone could become the worst thing that happened to me.

A high school girl in Michigan was cyberbullied for more than a year.

And who turned out to be the suspect shocked everyone.

There were details in some of the texts

that made it seem as though somebody was stalking them.

You had to be careful of every single word you said,

or else you could look guilty.

These texts were coming in at a clip of 40, 50 a day.

When they involve the state police and then eventually the FBI,

you can just see how fast this escalates.

Have you ever sent anything to either one of them like this?

This is felony stalking.

I have to make sure you are safe before I leave.

The more friends you have,

the easier it is to be betrayed by them.

It's crazy how something like that could happen at Beal.

Things were about to get so much worse.

There was a girl in my class that threw a Halloween party every year,

and all of our classmates would go, and all of our parents would go.

We were about a year into our relationship, me and Lauryn,

and she was not invited,

but, like, I basically invited her.

Like, "If I'm going, you're gonna come with me."

I didn't wanna go to the Halloween party.

She wasn't a fan of the girls in our grade.

She just wanted it to be me and her, no one else.

About two weeks before the Halloween party,

we got a text from an unknown number in a group chat.

...and we are both down to fuck.

I was just really confused of who this could be.

Maybe one of our friends just trying to mess with me and Owen.

I asked Khloe 'cause we were, like, best friends, and it was her party.

You know, I'm like, "Do you know who sent this?"

Or, like, "Did you send it?" You know, just asking around.

I was like, "Okay, it's just gonna stop. Just give it some time."

After the Halloween party, the messages had kind of stopped,

and things seemed to get better.

Everything is normal, you know, at the school. Like, everyone's friends.

You know, like,

there was, like, no beef between anyone that would have started these messages.

I was actually excited about the new school year.

But then, after almost a year,

the messages came back.

It seemed like the text messages were trying to break me and Owen up.

I knew it wasn't somebody I knew

because I would have had their phone number saved in my phone.

There was no reason for it, you know?

Like, the first text was for the Halloween party.

Like, this just happened, and then we got more.

I wanted them to answer the phone so we could maybe figure out who it was.

But they would just text us right after we called them.

They would never answer the phone.

In a lot of the texts, the unknown sender

called me by my nickname, Lo.

So it really made me think it had to be

someone who had been around me or one of my close friends before.

I was getting at least six text messages-plus a day.

It was just really annoying

because I knew Owen wasn't involved with it,

and I knew he didn't know what was going on either.

Before all of this, dating Owen, I was just having a good life.

I loved life.

Daydreams...

I first met Owen in seventh grade when I was 12 years old.

Move me, baby, like no one's watching...

I thought he was cute.

Lauryn was shy, but, you know, she was sweet.

She was caring.

We always just were talking,

and then one day, eventually, I asked her out.

It was very, like, nerve-racking.

And so I was like, "I don't know if I'm ready for this." I was super red.

My head is spinning...

Lauryn started talking to a boy named Owen.

And I'm like, "You're talking to a boy? Aren't you a little young for that?"

You know, dad talk, you know?

They liked a lot of the same stuff, you know? A lot of the sports.

They went trick-or-treating together.

Little things like that.

What was your first date? Where did you go?

Hmm.

Mom, do you know?

I remember Owen just coming home

and telling me there was this cute blonde in his class.

Daydreams, I hear the...

They shared common interests, particularly in athletics.

Owen was very athletic and involved in sports, and so was Lauryn,

and so I thought they were a really nice fit.

We all just started hanging out as a group, started doing things.

My whole family liked her. You know, we just clicked.

Kendra and Owen's mom, Jill, became really good friends.

We would invite each other over. We'd have bonfires and just hang out

and spend time together while the kids were off playing.

- Yeah. - It's gonna go.

It'll set on fire.

Lauryn and Owen, they were always smiling and giggling together.

They were just like a high-school couple in a movie.

Their freshman year,

they were referred to as the golden couple.

I do think that there was some jealousy, you know, in their class,

maybe wanting a relationship, or wanting boys to notice the girls,

and, you know, they both had that.

I'm sure there was some... some of that.

Beal City School is preschool through 12th grade, all in one building.

The people in my high school,

I've grown up with since kindergarten, basically.

There are only 30 kids a class.

We all have group chats. We're all friends.

No one really, truly hates each other.

We had this class together,

which was science, and we would sit together.

And one day, Owen told us what was going on.

At first, it was like,

"Oh, I'm getting these weird messages. I don't know who they're from."

But as they would come in more,

he would start to tell us, like, actually what they were saying

and how they were saying things

from the conversations we were having in class.

I never really suspected it was the boys in our grade,

just 'cause the boys in our grade aren't super involved with people.

They don't really care about drama.

Boys don't really have drama. We just play sports and have fun. That's all.

Usually, there's a lot of mean girls.

I wanted to try to narrow it down to a certain amount of people.

We would FaceTime each other at night and just talk about it

and be like, "Okay, what came up in the text today?"

Like, "Who was around?"

We were making a list of what group it could be

or who specifically it could be.

I feel like, at Beal, like, there's certain groups.

The more popular one,

then there was the cheer group that...

They were just cheerleaders.

And there was just another group of girls that my cousin Adrianna was in,

who didn't have much drama.

And I thought it could've been the quieter ones

'cause they could have been more techy.

I was like, "Is it someone that even goes to Beal?"

"Is it someone inside the school?"

If it's a student,

when I get it at a certain time, there's only so many people it can be.

If I got a text message during the middle of a school day,

I would look around and see if anyone was on their phone.

They knew, like, what I was doing in class, I feel like.

Fuckin' trash bitch. Don't fuckin' wear leggings...

I would question what I wear to school,

how I look, how's my hair.

Definitely affected how I thought about myself.

Lauryn came home from school one day,

and she just had this look on her face and attitude.

And I'm like, "What's going on?"

She's just like, "No, I just got this dumb text at school."

I was just getting super frustrated with it.

But my mom was like, "Just ignore them."

"Obviously, you're beautiful."

Like, she was just encouraging me to not read them.

I told her just to keep being her

and just not even worry about anything, right?

I didn't believe anybody would do anything harmful.

Then it started to get worse and worse.

It was so bad where I didn't want to even go to school anymore.

I didn't really know who to trust.

And then I said, "Okay, that's it. I have to tell my parents."

They're 13.

If this is a ninth-grade girl or boy,

these are pretty intense.

We started, unfortunately,

having to take Owen's phone every night.

I tried to fight them on it. I haven't had my phone for a year. I wanted privacy.

We would have to sit and read all the messages, start to end.