He didn't mean to press Enter. But when he did Tuesday evening, he reached thousands of UF students through the emergency alert system with a text reading, "The monkey got out of the cage."
The suspect, a former Mobile Campus employee, said he was showing his friends that he could still access the alert system.
He said that the message was not racially motivated.
The suspect is a Gainesville resident and confessed to police Wednesday evening after questioning. His name is being withheld until he is formally charged, which could be as early as Thursday, said Steve Orlando, UF spokesman.
"We want people to know we're pursuing it," Orlando said. "We're taking this seriously, and we won't have anything like this happen again."
So far UF officials believe that no student data was compromised when the texts where sent.
