Sometimes one wrong click really can change your life.

Take the case of Jeffrey Sirois. At 3:30pm on the afternoon of September 25, 2014, the 57-year old soccer coach and grocery store owner unbuttoned his blue jeans. Sitting on the brown suede love seat in the living room of his Lebanon, Connecticut home, Sirois held his smartphone at arm's length as he masturbated, recording a 10-second video clip of the act. Sirois sent the clip to his girlfriend, using the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat. He waited for confirmation that she opened the video on her own phone.

But no confirmation came. After several moments of waiting, Sirois wondered if he had made a mistake.

He checked his Snapchat history and realized the awful truth: instead of sending the message only to his girlfriend, Sirois sent it to all 30 people on his contact list, including at least six high school girls from the soccer team he coached at nearby E.O. Smith High School.

Sirois quickly removed the video from Snapchat. Given that it was live on Snapchat's servers for just 15 seconds, Sirois hoped that he avoided any of the life-altering consequences that might flow from such a mistake. He waited to hear from any of his players; no one got in touch. Four o'clock passed. Four thirty. Five o'clock. Perhaps he was in the clear.

At 5:10pm, the phone rang. On the other end was E.O. Smith's athletic director, Steve Robichaud.

"Do you need to tell me anything?" he asked.

Unintentional

At the moment Sirois sent his video clip, a group of varsity soccer girls were gathering for a post-school snack at Husky Pizza, a local joint a few hundred yards away from E.O. Smith. One of the girls, Elizabeth (not her real name), had her yellow iPhone 5C on the table. The phone notified her that she had a waiting message from "Coach Sirois." She friended him through the service two weeks earlier, and Sirois had sent only a handful of images so far—mostly himself in soccer jerseys. Elizabeth expected more of the same when she immediately clicked on the video message.

"I only watched about three seconds of the video and I realized what was going on," she later told a Connecticut State Trooper investigating the case. "Once I realized what I was watching I threw my phone down on the table and said, 'Guys, you have to look at this'... We were all shocked by what we saw in the video and were talking about it."

At the same moment, another varsity soccer player was "messing around with my phone" in her grandmother's home across town. She saw the same Snapchat story from Sirois' account. "When I saw it I freaked out," the girl told investigators. "I only looked at the video for a second before I shut it off... Coach can make people uncomfortable at times because he can be creepy or weird." But, she added, "He has never touched me or said anything inappropriate to me."

The Sirois video wasn't viewable for long. When another of the girls at Husky Pizza checked her own Snapchat account three minutes later, the video had disappeared. Sirois unfriended the girls on the soccer team shortly thereafter.

Elizabeth sent around a group text to teammates saying, "Coach's Snapchat Story?" The players at Husky Pizza sat shocked, wondering what to do. After several texts and phone calls, the girls at the pizza shop decided that someone had to be told. They made their way back across the street to E.O. Smith, where they found the girl's varsity volleyball team in mid-practice. They told the coach, Gail Murphy, what happened. Murphy immediately called the school's athletic director, telling him that she had several students with her in the gym who said they just saw Sirois "touching himself on a Snapchat video."

Robichaud, the athletic director, called the principal, then the girls' parents, and finally Sirois himself.

"I would have never sent anything like that intentionally and it's been deleted," Robichaud recalled the coach telling him. He added that Sirois "did not appear alarmed or apologetic." Sirois was told not to return to school until the matter was settled.