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NPR
Texas High School Student Shows Off
Homemade Clock, Gets Handcuffed
September 16, 2015
Bill Chappell
A 14-year-old boy
says he was just trying to show off his engineering skill when he brought a
digital clock he had made to his new high school in Irving, Texas. But
Ahmed Mohamed was detained and reportedly suspended from school, after a
teacher thought that his clock looked like a bomb.
The aspiring
engineer repeatedly said that it was not, in fact, a bomb. But the teacher
and the principal of MacArthur High School were alarmed. They called
police, who questioned Mohamed, handcuffed him and led him out of school.
He was then fingerprinted before being released to his family, who say he
received a three-day suspension from school.
"Cool clock,
Ahmed," President Obama wrote in a tweet around midday Wednesday.
"Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like
you to like science. It's what makes America great."
...
The police tell
local news outlets that while they acknowledge that Mohamed didn't try to
perpetrate a bomb hoax, they were also unsatisfied with his explanation.
"He would
simply only tell us that it was a clock," police spokesman James
McLellan says. "He didn't offer an explanation as to what it was for,
why he created this device, why he brought it to school."
Responding to
questions about the incident, the Irving school district released a
statement in which it said that students and staff at its schools are
encouraged to report any suspicious behavior.
No criminal charges
were filed — but Mohamed's family says the school and police overreacted.
And the case has raised questions over whether Mohamed was treated with
particular suspicion because of ethnic and religious bias.
"I think this
wouldn't even be a question if his name wasn't Ahmed Mohamed," Alia
Salem of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations tells local news WFAA. "He is an excited kid who is very
bright and wants to share it with his teachers."
Representatives from
CAIR will reportedly be attending a meeting later today between Mohamed's
parents and school officials.
...
Mohamed says he
wanted to show the engineering teacher there what he'd done over the
weekend: take apart a clock and rebuild it inside a pencil case. Resembling
a small briefcase, the case has a hologram of a tiger on it.
"It was the
first time I brought an invention to school to show a teacher,"
Mohamed tells WFAA in an interview taped in his bedroom, where circuits and
wires sit on shelves alongside basketballs and footballs.
Here's how things
unfolded, according to The Dallas Morning News:
"He showed it
to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn't get quite
the reaction he'd hoped for.
" 'He was like,
"That's really nice," Ahmed said. "I would advise you not to
show any other teachers." '
"He kept the
clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained
when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his
invention up to show her afterward.
" 'She was
like, it looks like a bomb,' he said.
" 'I told her,
"It doesn't look like a bomb to me." '
"The teacher
kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of
sixth period, he suspected he wouldn't get it back."
Ahmed Mohamed also
gave the newspaper his account of the day in a video in which he says,
"It made me feel like I wasn't human. It made me feel like I was a
criminal."
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