Former coach charged with harrassment after falsely accusing two others at school of sexual contact with their athletes
A disturbed former high school coach has been arrested after sending in false reports of teen sex abuse by other coaches at the school where he had worked.
"I was mad at the school for the way I was treated. I was just furious," Tim Udinski admitted to Montgomery County (Pa.) detectives.
As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bucks County Courier Times and CBS Philadelphia, among other sources, 43-year-old Tim Udinski was arrested on Tuesday in connection with seven different counts of harassment and stalking. All of those accounts relate to false accusations Udinski leveled against two other coaches at Lansdale (Penn.) Catholic High, where Udinski spent one year as the head lacrosse coach.
First, Udinski accused former football coach Jim Algeo of sexually soliciting one of his players. Then, across a series of seven reports between October and May, Udinski reported Algeo and the school's new boys lacrosse coach, Nick Pison, of sexually assaulting Lansdale Catholic students.
All of the accusations were false, but all required in-depth investigation sby local authorities. Because the accusations first emerged in the midst of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal at Penn State, local authorities scrambled to ensure they responded vigilantly to all the complaints.
As more and more research turned up no proof of any sexual assault, authorities began to be skeptical about Udinski himself. After some 150 hours of investigating the allegations against the Lansdale Catholic coaches, police turned to Udinski himself, who admitted he had fabricated the accounts in anger against the school which had fired him.
While Udinski has now come clean about his complaints, that does little to ease the financial burden the investigations had on the cash-strapped county. According to Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Ferman, more than 200 man hours and thousands of dollars were wasted as investigations into Udinski's complaints moved along apace.
"We used… or perhaps a better word is 'wasted,' thousands of dollars. We used close to 200 man-hours. We interviewed 97 individuals," Ferman told KYW Newsradio.
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