False allegations shatter life of former Cy-Fair coach
The coach was driving home when the calls and texts started coming, at first a trickle and then a monsoon.
He ignored them, focusing on the highway. But the torrent of dings and buzzes became impossible to ignore. He wondered: What could be happening? Everything had been normal when he got in the car.
Finally, he pulled to the side of the highway to see what was causing the commotion.
It was there, on U.S. 59, across from the imposing Lakewood Church, that the man learned his life had jolted, drastically, in a horrible and unforeseeable new direction.
Although the Houston Chronicle is not identifying him, the coach’s name is easy to find. That’s the heart of the problem. A simple Google search for his name returns about 16,300 results. A few items in the first few pages reference the man’s career as a high school teacher and coach in the suburbs of Houston. But the majority of links stem from a Dec. 13 television report, that says he’d been accused by a student of touching her under her shirt and pulling at her panties against her will during a biology class. On multiple occasions, in front of everyone in the room.
The TV report mentioned him by name, said he’d been placed on administrative leave and officials from the Cypress Fairbanks
Independent School District would be investigating the allegations against him.
The Houston Chronicle did not name the coach back in December. He wasn’t facing any criminal charges. But many local news organizations did. Anyone with access to Google could easily find page after page, after page, after page of allegations that would end most teachers’ careers.
Scrolling through the story a friend had sent him, on the side of the highway that December afternoon, the coach was struck by a flagrant mistake. He didn’t even teach the class where a teacher with his name was accused of acting inappropriately.
His wife believed him from the moment he told her, and his son was too young to understand what was happening. But others did not reserve judgment.
In the next six months, the coach would lose his job, his faith he’d find a new one, the respect of
many students, the chance to watch his team in a state baseball tournament and, most painfully to him, his family’s sense of peace.
No gray area
Six months later, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District issued its finding: The coach had been officially exonerated, cleared of all the allegations. No gray area. It had been a hoax, the district said.
“No persons interviewed claimed they were sexually assaulted, raped or molested by Mr. (name omitted), including the original alleged victim identified in the social media posts and news stories,” the statement asserted. “There were no reports of knowledge of any rumors of such sexual assault, rape or molestation and no one identified any possible victims.”
His wife had stood by him. His mother had passed away before the fiasco began. He was thankful she didn’t have to live through it.
Representatives for the district did not weigh in or respond to multiple requests for comment about his exoneration on Friday. It wasn’t clear whether any students making false allegations against him will face criminal charges.
After all those months of uncertainty, the former Cypress Woods High School teacher and coach had found himself reduced to a statistic — among the rarest of statistics.
A 2014 report in the Law & Society Review examined all reports of sexual assault to the Los Angeles Police Department in 2008 and determined somewhere around 4.5 percent of them were found to be false. People again and again drastically overestimate the number of false reports of sexual assault, according to a Brown University article. By far, the majority of these reports pan out.
The coach doesn’t hold any grudges against district officials. They did what they had to do. He’s glad they were willing to follow through and so publicly clear his name for a list of allegations that surpassed those he’d had leveled against him.
But his life still took a profound detour. And he may not ever get back to the route he’d been on.
In an era of teaching shortages, the 20-year veteran coach and teacher hasn’t received a call about any of his applications for district openings. He’s thought about visiting each district where he has applied in-person to tell them about the result of the investigation, in case they’ve been Googling him. He’s also had the thought that maybe, after decades in the field, he might be better off giving up and doing something else — getting a commercial license and becoming a truck driver, maybe.
Pain drags on
He was naïve about how life-changing the accusations would be. He thought, at first, district officials would look into them over the holiday break and, by the time everyone returned to school for the spring semester, he’d be cleared and everything would be back to normal.
Instead, the weeks turned into months. Students at the school took sides amid the gossip surrounding the investigation. And, each night, the coach would stay up long after his wife and son went to bed, blocking numbers and calling police each time he received a threatening call.
He received between six or seven calls each night, he figured, sometimes up to 12. They’d stretch from midnight to 3 a.m. and kept coming from December through mid-February.
In the end, he’d blocked 42 numbers on his phone. He kept track of the count.
Instead of teaching and coaching baseball, he spent his days as a stay-at-home father, cooking and cleaning and spending time with his son and thinking about side hustles and new ways he might coach baseball outside of school.
He dedicated time to figuring out, once the investigation landed on the truth, how he might take down the reams of digital articles and online posts accusing him of terrible acts. He quickly learned that would be impossible.
After months of uncertainty, the coach voluntarily resigned from the district. He didn’t want his shadow hanging over the students he’d come to care about during his four years at the campus. And once the air cleared, he didn’t relish the prospect of returning to the place where he’d been accused.
It meant missing out on a trip to the state baseball tournament with the student-athletes he’d helped develop for four years.
“You have no idea how hard that was,” he said. “You put in four years of work — missing time with your family — and you knew the return was the state trip that you don’t get to make. It was tough.”
For each of the small indignities and the uncertainty and fear he faced while waiting for the investigation to finish, the worst part was the silence. The people who didn’t call or stop by.
He couldn’t communicate with most people about what was happening, how he was feeling or what the future might hold. Aside from his family and his lawyer.
It’s still not clear what’s next. The only certainty is that there’s no going back.
The coach never Googled himself following the allegations he’d been abusive toward a student. It had never occurred to him until a good friend asked him about it.
“He told me, later in life, my son is going to Google my name,” he said. “And he asked me what I’m going to tell him.”
The coach is not sure what he’ll say. But he hopes that if he keeps being a good and dedicated father, when the time comes, maybe those Google results won’t make a difference.