My wife and I spent some time with our kids this weekend. Both of them mentioned to us at different times this new documentary they had watched on Netflix called UNKNOWN NUMBER: THE HIGH SCHOOL CATFISH, from director Skye Borgman. It had blown them both away, so we decided to watch it when we got home, and it’s a doozy.

Here’s a brief summary of the events covered… in the small community of Beal City, Michigan, teenage sweethearts Lauryn Licari and Owen McKenny, both around 13 years old, begin receiving disturbing text messages from an unknown number in October 2020. The initial messages say things like Owen is breaking up with Lauryn because he doesn’t like her anymore and wants to be with the person sending the messages instead. The messages pause for a few months, but when they resume in 2021 they get way worse, spamming the kids with up to 50 messages a day over the next year or so. These texts say awful stuff: insulting Lauren’s body, describing sexual acts the sender wants to do to Owen, telling Lauryn to just kill herself, etc. The person sending the texts uses details that only someone close could know. Owen and Lauren finally tell their parents, who go to the school’s administration and from there, local sheriff Mike Main. As you can imagine, the parents’ suspicions begin falling on some of the local teenage girls, especially an excellent young athlete and popular girl named Khloe Wilson. When the sheriff’s investigation comes up empty, the case is escalated to the FBI’s cybercrimes task force and agent Bradley Peter, who is able then to apply advanced forensics techniques. The case finally begins coming to a head when agent Peter is able to link key IP addresses to one specific phone number, a number that matches a person in the community. I won’t go any further so you can discover the rest for yourself if you haven’t watched it yet. 

This is one of those documentaries that may stay with me for awhile. As a father whose kids are now past the ages of the kids who were viciously harassed, I’m mostly left wondering how I would have handled a situation like this if it was happening to one of them. Here are a few thoughts I had while watching the film. First, I’ve watched my beautiful daughter struggle with issues of body image, especially in high school, and she still struggles with it today. I know firsthand the physical and emotional dangers involved with these types of issues. If someone was anonymously attacking her, I would probably explode, and I honestly don’t know what I would have done. It makes me sick just thinking about it. Second, the inadequacy of local law enforcement in many rural communities for solving crimes and punishing criminals is glaringly on display. I’ve always lived in small, rural communities, and I’ve been a victim of crimes on two separate occasions, a hit and run in 1998, and identity theft in 2005. Both times, I solved the crimes myself and passed the info on to the police. As far as I know, even though I filed the proper reports as well as the proof for the crimes, nothing ever happened to the perpetrators. In this specific case, to his credit, the sheriff did finally escalate the situation up to the FBI, but for many months, the kids had to deal with the harassment, the community had suspicions against innocent people running wild, and the parents were at their wits end. If the sheriff had not escalated the situation, this case would probably never have been solved. Finally, I’m amazed by the shit that is going on underneath the surface of the “normal people” all around us each day. I probably shouldn’t be, because my life has had its own share of drama that all but the closest people to me knew nothing about. David Lynch even plays with this theme in his weird and excellent BLUE VELVET. My wife likes to remind me that we should always be kind to people because we never know what they’re dealing with. There’s a lot of truth to that. I periodically remind her not to honk at people who cut her off in traffic because you never know who’s behind that other wheel either. At the end of the day, the craziest stories usually emerge from communities and people that we can all relate to. A place like Beal City is a lot like the places I grew up. 

Overall, if you enjoy real life documentaries that explore the crazy acts that normal people are capable of, you will probably like UNKNOWN NUMBER: THE HIGH SCHOOL CATFISH. It will definitely reinforce your ongoing inability to fully trust your family, friends and neighbors! 

I’ve included the trailer below: