Investigators say 43-year-old Timothy Udinski with a click of the mouse destroyed the reputations of two good men and put an entire community on edge.
"They have been damaged and it's a travesty," Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said.
Udinski was fired after a year as head coach of the Lansdale Catholic High lacrosse team.
The D.A. says he then started sending anonymous emails to the archdiocese claiming that two other coaches at the school were sexually abusing students.
The emails were sent between October, 2011 and May, 2012. His firing stemmed from repeated heated arguments with players and staff, Ferman said, and the school's principal told investigators that Udinski was "extremely upset about his firing."
"Anytime an allegation is made we need to take it as possibly true, not to question it and report it," Lansdale Catholic High School principal Timothy Quinn said.
Detectives spent months looking into the allegations and interviewed 97 people.
They found the allegations to be false and discovered that Udinski had allegedly been using library computers and a work computer to send the anonymous emails.
"It's just a horrible, reckless act designed to hurt other people without any basis," Ferman said.
The archdiocese and Lansdale Catholic are also victims in this case.
The investigation into the false allegations threw the school and its community into turmoil.
"It's unnerving because it could be any of us; if there are other people out there we may have upset, it could be me tomorrow," school president Jim Casey said.
It was personal for Principal Timothy Quinn.
He played ball for one of the accused coaches and is a personal friend.
"It is a person that I value and respect very deeply and spent a lot of time with, and to have to have to make that type of report was very difficult," Quinn said.
Udinski was arraigned on three stalking and harassment charges and released on $25,000 bail.
The school administrators say they're praying for him.
The estimated cost to Montgomery County taxpayers to investigate these multiple false reports was more than $8,250, Ferman said.
