The mystery is over.
Six days after a text message that read, "The monkey got out of the cage," went out to 40,000 UF students and professors, police named Andrew Tatum as the culprit.
Tatum, a 24-year-old former Mobile Campus employee, said he was at a friend's house when he decided to see if the company's password was still the same.
He said the message was a joke, spurred by the show "Family Guy" and YouTube Internet cartoons.
Many who received the message assumed it was racially charged, particularly because it went out on the day of President Barack Obama's inauguration.
Tatum said he hadn't taken that into consideration and added that he voted for President Obama in the election.
"I just don't want people thinking I'm racist or that the message was racist in any way," he said.
Mobile Campus, a mobile communication system UF uses to inform students and staff of emergencies, labeled the text message as improper use and locked its system after the message was sent out at 8:45 p.m. on Jan. 20.
The former UF advertising student said when he clicked the "next" button on the screen after typing the message, he expected to get a screen saying, "Are you sure you want to send this?" with a proceed button.
But there was no such screen. And seconds later, the phone of one of Tatum's friends let out a beep. Tatum did not get the message because he's not a UF student.
"I didn't call UPD at that time because I didn't think it was that big of a deal," Tatum said. "But immediately after it went out, I thought, 'This is going to suck.'"
After the message was sent, Mobile Campus secured its system, changed its passwords and allowed only two of its ten employees to have access to them, said David Liniado, CEO of Mobile Campus. "We have had no issues like this since the company was founded in 2005," Liniado said.
Liniado had been a co-worker of Tatum's and said Tatum left the company in October on good terms when the company downsized.
Tatum said that he sent authorized text messages to UF students and faculty when he was the director of technology for Mobile Campus from September 2005 to October 2008.
The University Police Department tracked the IP address on the computer Tatum used to send the text message at his friend's house. UPD showed up at Tatum's friend's house the day after the text message was sent out, and Tatum was there.
Tatum, who says he is facing third-degree felony charges for misuse of computers, has reapplied to UF for the summer semester.
