He says he brought the homemade clock to school to show his teacher.
Advertisement
Ahmed Mohamed said he lost a lot of things, including his safety and creativity, almost a year after his arrest in Irving, Texas, when police and school officials mistook his homemade digital clock for a hoax bomb. Instead, the school called the police.
After Mohamed was seen in a NASA T-shirt in handcuffs, the Twitter hashtag #IStandWithAhmed trended globally, and the teenager was praised by Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who said, “Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest”. Mohamed became known as “clock boy” and embarked on a whirlwind media tour. The suit, which you can read in full here, accuses them of violating Mohamed’s civil rights. Mohamed is black, Muslim, and was born in Sudan.
“The school “gets a “D” for Anti-Muslim sentiment and politicizing history, it gets an ‘F” for continuing a long tradition of racial disparity in student discipline'”. The family’s announcement of their decision to move to Qatar, a day after meeting with Obama, suggests that the episode was part of some weird scam engineered by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed al-Hassan Mohamed.
Mohamed showed the clock to his teachers. She asked to hold onto it until the end of the day, and that seemed to be the end of it.
“He not only participated, he threatened Ahmed with expulsion if he didn’t sign a statement (saying the act was purposeful), in complete violation of Ahmed’s rights and his own responsibilities as the principal of the school”, the suit states.
The 2015 arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, then a 14-year-old bespectacled ninth-grader who dabbled in robotics and attended high school in Irving, had ignited a social media firestorm. Ultimately, he moved with his family to Qatar, where he had been offered a scholarship.
The Mohameds subsequently made a decision to move to Qatar, citing death threats, harassment and a scholarship for Ahmed from the Gulf country. He loves America, he says, but is afraid to be here.
While the clock incident is the centerpiece of the suit, it also details a history of discrimination against the student – including allegations he was taunted by other students with nicknames of “Sausage Boy” and “Bacon Boy” in reference to his religion’s aversion to pork.
Advertisement
Last November, it was reported that Ahmed and his family wrote letters to the City of Irving threatening a civil suit unless they received $15 million in damages and apologies from city and school officials. This suit is not related to that previous threat, however, and does not specify an amount that Mohamed is seeking.
