A 14-year old ninth grader from Irving, Texas was arrested at his school Monday after teachers thought his homemade clock looked like a bomb. Ahmed Mohamed was taken to a juvenile detention center, suspended from school and could still face charges of making a hoax bomb, according to a report from the Dallas News.
The boy was led out of MacArthur High School in handcuffs on Monday afternoon, hours after showing the clock to his engineering teacher as a demonstration of his aptitude for working with electronics. He showed the clock to his English teacher after it rang while he carried it inside his backpack.
“She said, ‘Well it looks like a bomb. Don’t show it to anyone else,’” Ahmed Mohamed said of the encounter. “And she decides to take it from me.”
Principal Daniel Cummings and an officer pulled him out of sixth period and took him into a room where four other officers were waiting. One of them allegedly said of Mohamed, “Yup. That’s who I thought it was,” even though he had never met the teen.
“I tried making a phone call to my father. They said, ‘You’re in the middle of an interrogation, you can’t have a phone call,’” the boy recalled. “I really don’t think it’s fair because I brought something to school that wasn’t a threat to anyone. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just showed my teachers something and I end up being arrested later that day.”
Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, told the Dallas Morning News: “He just wants to invent good things for mankind. But his name is Mohamed and because of September 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
Police spokesperson James McLellan said: “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb. He kept maintain it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation. It could reasonable be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
The Council of American-Islamic Relations said they were investigating.
