He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped.
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He said his engineering teacher told him “that’s really nice”, but advised him “not to show any other teachers”.
Later in the day, Ahmed sat in English class. Sadly, the clock kept beeping, and a teacher insisted that she be shown what was causing the disruption.
While the device the student brought to school was harmless, The Dallas Morning News reports that 9-grader and electronics enthusiast Ahmed Mohamed might still be charged with “making a hoax bomb”.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. One of them allegedly said of Mohamed, “Yup. That’s who I thought it was” when he looked at the brown-skinned boy.
According to Irving police, Ahmed’s case contained a digital clock that the student had taken apart and rearranged. “Don’t show it to anyone else, ‘” Ahmed Mohamed said of the encounter.
“I tried making a phone call to my father”.
The Dallas Morning News reports that Ahmed built the clock at home on Sunday night. When he took it to school the next day, he was pulled out of class, interviewed by police officers, and taken in handcuffs to juvenile detention, after being told by teachers that his creation looked like a bomb. Mohamed maintained that his project was nothing but a simple clock.
The same police statement points out that the clock “could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a vehicle”.
“She was like, it looks like a bomb”, he said. His family said the principal suspended him for three days.
Ahmed’s father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who is originally from Sudan, said his son “just wants to invent good things for mankind, but because his name is Mohamed and because of 11 September I think my son got mistreated”.
The spokesperson, James McLellan (who must surely be wondering why it had to happen on his shift) also told the Dallas newspaper “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb”. The police have his homemade clock, which he says is housed in “a box you could get at Target for like, five, 10 dollars, and they were telling me it was a suitcase, a briefcase”.
“It just shocked me that people could do this to him”.
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The Council of American-Islamic Relations said it was investigating. Attorneys for the organization, along with the Mohameds, told local TV station WFAA they plan to meet with MacArthur High School principal and the Irving police chief on Wednesday afternoon.
