Police charged Andrew Tatum, a former employee of Mobile Campus, with third-degree felony charges for misuse of computers, after he used the University of Florida’s emergency-alert system to send a text message to more than 42,000 students, professors, and staff members last week.
Mr. Tatum, 24, said he was showing a friend that he still had access to the alert service when he typed the message “The monkey got out of the cage” into the system. He said he did not mean to actually send the message.
Some students interpreted the message as a racial slur, believing it was a reference to the swearing-in of President Obama, since the mysterious message appeared on Inauguration Day. Mr. Tatum told the university’s student newspaper yesterday that the comment had nothing to do with race, but was instead a reference to a joke on an episode of the TV show Family Guy. He said he voted for Mr. Obama.
Mr. Tatum had worked for Mobile Campus, the company that runs the text-alert service for the University of Florida, until October, and he reportedly left on good terms. —Jeffrey R. Young
