14 Year Old Brings Homemade Clock To School. Teacher Says It Looks Like A Bomb. Cops Arrest Him.

Could the fact that it’s Texas and his name is Ahmed Mohamed have anything to do with this?

Ahmed Mohamed is by definition, if not by diploma, an engineer. The book you see behind him in the photo above is titled The Engineering Book. He likes to make things, and by all accounts he’s very good at it. 

Ahmed Mohamed attends MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, and on Monday he brought a clock he made to school. He showed it to his engineering teacher who suggested he not show it to anyone else.

UPDATE: ‘It’s What Makes America Great’: Obama Trolls Trump, Invites Arrested Teen Clock Maker To White House

Later, when the clock’s alarm accidentally went off, another teacher got upset, and after class Ahmed showed the teacher it was just a clock he made. She confiscated it.

Shortly after, a police officer and the school principal removed Ahmed from his next class. He was escorted into a room with four other cops.

“Yup,” a police officer Ahmed says he has never seen before exclaimed. “That’s who I thought it was.”

The Dallas Morning News reports “officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.”

“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.

“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”

“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”

Instead of going to the student council meeting, Ahmed, wearing a NASA t-shirt, was arrested and handcuffed in front of his fellow students, taken from school, and later fingerprinted. 

He apparently was also interrogated without an attorney or his parents present, and says he was not allowed to call them during the interrogation. Hopefully the ACLU or a civil rights attorney will be working on this.

“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Police spokesperson James McLellan, defending the actions of police officers, says. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”

UPDATE: Here’s A Photo Of The Clock That Got a 14 Year Old Boy Arrested For Making A ‘Hoax Bomb’

MacArthur High School’s principal has suspended Ahmed for three days. 

The Dallas Morning News adds, “Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.”

Here’s Ahmed’s account:

On Twitter, people are using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed to express support and outrage:

 

 

Image: Screenshot via The Dallas Morning News/YouTube