17-Year-Old Girl Charged With Cyberstalking Fellow Teen

It's the modern day equivalent of graffiti on a bathroom wall. A Marion County girl was arrested for posting explicit messages about another girl and adding her phone number to an Internet porn site.

Marion County sheriff's deputies say 17-year-old Shannon Marie Mitchell posted sexually explicit messages about a 15-year-old girl on a porn website. The messages included the girl's cell phone number along with comments like “great at phone sex.”

The messages were enough for investigators to transport Shannon Mitchell to the Juvenile Assessment Center on a charge of aggravated cyberstalking, which is a felony.

“Guys from wherever were calling saying, ‘I’m going to be in Ocala. I hear you do this, I hear you do that.’ As you can imagine, for a 15-year-old girl, that's got to be hell,” Judge Cochran of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said.

Mitchell, a high school senior, was interviewed at her Ocala home by detectives. During the interview, detectives said, Shannon stated, “I did it,” and told detectives the victim would not stop harassing her.

Mitchell and the 15-year-old victim have never met, but investigators say the suspect is currently dating the victim's ex-boyfriend and that may have been enough to provoke Mitchell.

To the victim’s family, it is not a game.

“She has received countless inappropriate text messages, private phone calls coming through,” the victim’s mother told WFTV over the phone.

The sheriff's office said that the original posts that prompted their investigation have been removed. But with more complaints of teens harassing each other via cell phone and over the Internet, deputies want teens to know how seriously they take the crime.

“When you make a call to the Marion County Sheriff's Office and say my child is being cyber-bullied or sexually harassed, we investigate that,” Cochran said.

Mitchell is charged with a third-degree felony. If she were an adult, that charge could carry a maximum of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. However, in the juvenile system the focus is on rehabilitation and judges have more discretion.