Jamaican tennis coach Rayne Russell says he intends to use his recent social media adventure that resulted in a brush with law enforcers in the United States as a lesson to youngsters, especially those who benefit from his classes, on responsible use of the technology.

“I am owning up to my mistake. What has happened has been detrimental. Whether you post something for a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, once someone gets a picture of you and it goes viral, there is no way to control it,” Russell told the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday.

“The damage was already done by the initial thought process, just by thinking that this would be okay and some people would like it. That is the real lesson to learn,” he added.

Russell became the subject of a police and federal investigation after he posted a photo of himself on March 22 on Instagram holding a high-powered rifle with a silencer and stating that he was ready for the Ultra Music Festival scheduled for March 23-25 at Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida.

The caption of the photo, which also showed a handgun on a coffee table, read: “Ready for the weekend” and included the hashtags “#tgif,” “#ultramusicfestival” and “#mmw2018”, the last one a reference to Miami Music Week.

The picture was tagged in Fort Lauderdale, where Russell had it taken at the home of a friend who is a licensed firearm holder and owner of the guns.

“When I posted that picture I really didn’t have too much of a thought process. I was more fascinated by this firearm that my friend had. It was something I had never seen before,” Russell told the Observer.

“What happened was, when I posted the picture I copied some tags that I had in another window open on my phone, and once the post went — I didn’t even look at it — I got a message from my friend and he said ‘You’re joking. Is this for real?’

“I responded asking what did he mean because I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but then I realised very quickly, went to the post and it looked very bad, didn’t look very good, so I immediately took it down,” he explained.

However, by then the Miami Police’s social media command team had started investigating the post.

Russell said he found out later that the police had tried contacting him via a Miami phone number once listed to him. However, when the new owner of the number answered he told the cops that they had the wrong number, hung up, and turned the phone off.

That, he said, led the police to believe that he was playing a “cat and mouse game” with them.

He said the police also tried to contact him via e-mail, but during that time his phone was dead and was being recharged.

However, it was when he started posting pictures of himself at the festival that they were able to get to him in person, using the hat he was wearing and large Jamaican flag he was sporting like a cape to identify him.

But Russell said that even before the law enforcers apprehended him, he was still feeling a bit uneasy as he realised that the post could have been interpreted as the work of a man intent on doing harm, especially after the massacre of 59 people by a gunman at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas last October.

The gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, injured a further 527 people while firing from the vantage point of a 32nd-floor hotel room. He turned one of his guns on himself before police stormed the room.

Russell said he reasoned that by posting pictures of himself at the Ultra Music Festival it would put the authorities at ease.

“I figured that, by me posting and saying that I’m at the event and there is no threat, I’m here to have fun, I would be fine, not knowing that there was a whole team, including FBI agents, set up to try and find me,” he told the Observer.

The tennis coach was taken in by the law enforcers and questioned. However, they eventually determined that he posed no threat and released him.

Russell emphasised the professional manner in which the police and FBI agents handled the situation, saying that the outcome could have been quite different had they not checked his bona fides.

“If people look through my posts they will realise that this particular post was not something that I would do. It was totally out of character,” he said, adding that the American authorities also spoke to people who know him and who vouched for his good character.

“He did something thinking it was funny, and obviously we didn’t find it funny at all,” one US media report quoted Miami Police officer Michael Vega.

Russell agreed, telling the Observer that he recognises that “things like this can impact kids who are so involved in social media and who could be trying to figure out if something is real or a joke. So you can take it too far and you just never know”.

“I’m very grateful that I am able to turn this story into something which should help some of these kids and people like myself to avoid getting into trouble, because this experience just isn’t worth it,” said Russell, who pointed out that he has two daughters, one 14 and the other five years old.

“It was an eye-opening experience; everything happened so fast and it just shows that these things are being monitored and the minute anything comes up they check and double-check… we should not be posting things like that,” he added.