Irving 9th-grader arrested after taking homemade clock to school: 'So you tried to make a bomb?'

[flitox]

After taking a homemade clock to school, Irving MacArthur High student Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was taken in handcuffs to juvenile detention. Police say they may charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

By AVI SELK

IRVING — Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. 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.

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

Box of circuit boards

A box full of circuit boards sits at the foot of Ahmed’s small bed in central Irving. His door marks the border where the Mohamed family’s cramped but lavishly decorated house begins to look like the back room at RadioShack.

“Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do,” Ahmed said, fiddling with a cable while a soldering iron dangled from the shelf behind him.

He loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school.

So he decided to do what he’s always done: He built something.

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.

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.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions.

The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the 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.’”

Police skepticism

Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said police spokesman James McLellan. And police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still didn’t believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.

“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”

Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:

“It could reasonably 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?”

Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”

Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.

They’re still investigating the case, and Ahmed hasn’t been back to school. His family said the principal suspended him for three days.

“They thought, ‘How could someone like this build something like this unless it’s a threat?’” Ahmed said.

An Irving ISD statement gave no details about the case, citing student privacy laws.

‘Invent good things’

“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”

Mohamed is familiar with anti-Islamic politics. He once made national headlines for debating a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.

But he wasn’t paying much attention this summer when Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne became a national celebrity in anti-Islamic circles, fueling rumors in speeches that the religious minority was plotting to usurp American laws.

However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations took note.

“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem, who directs the council’s North Texas chapter and has spoken to lawyers about Ahmed’s arrest.

“We’re still investigating,” she said, “but it seems pretty egregious.”

Meanwhile, Ahmed is sitting home in his bedroom, tinkering with old gears and electrical converters, pronouncing words like “ethnicity” for what sounds like the first time.

He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-ninth-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece

[Ballistic Gelatin]

[RETRACTED 9/21/2015. i am withdrawing my original comments below. It appears there are legitimate concerns about the veracity of the teen's claims of having built the clock himself. See https://www.nsaneforums.com/topic/252298-nerds-rage-over-ahmed-mohameds-clock/&sa=U&ved=0CAQQFjAAahUKEwi63aX6-IjIAhUQNYgKHbOMDyM&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNE91wJb4tERQPAbto4344NXCsSi8Q]

Our schools (in Texas and the U.S., in general) are so F***ED up.

You can get suspended simply for drawing a PICTURE of a firearm.

In third grade, we had Go Texan Day in February, when the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo commenced. We all got put on our best cowboy garb -- including toy pistols and rifles -- and spend that day's recess playing Cowboys & Indians. If we'd done that today, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) would file suit against the school for sponsoring discriminatory activities.

In sixth grade, we had a monthly "Show and Tell" day. One of my classmates obtained permission from our teacher to bring his .22 cal. rifle to the classroom to explain his target-shooting hobby and the gun's safety features. Today, he would have been expelled.

I truly feel sorry for the Irving, Texas teenager. I hope he and his family sue the HELL out of that F***ING school.

[AlexCross]

When I was young, we had to do a creativity class, where you would draw what you like/fell etc. So in my artbox you would have found pictures with trees, fishes, landscapes, people, and some with zombies, where all the picture was red and you get the idea. People just laught when they saw it.... Thank god that I wasn't born in the US.

Note that I passed that class with maximum points and all my drawings were bought by people, including the gore ones.

[HX1]

Not to talk about things in the past but I can see why they feel the way they do... Texas is very discriminatory.. rather you have a tan or it is the real color of your skin.. or even your sexual orientation.. Some times it reminds of the old west with a bunch under-developed Neanderthal thugs seeing how many bones they can break because they have something to prove.. or want to be called a badass.. On top of that for some reason people tend to act the most ignorant and go straight to heightened states.. of over-exaggeration..

The events following 9/11 were traumatic in this area for these people.. One of their temple or mosques.. was shot to pieces with automatic weapons and several killed and injured.. just blocks from where I was... AND in the months that followed business which were owned by people of Indian descent closed their doors, convenient stores which where owned by those in the area were vandalized and also shut their doors. Many of these people who I knew and interacted with on a daily basis were traumatized by the events of 9/11 itself and then had to endure this time of persecution.. Many others around the globe lost their lives. It starts to remind me of blind Nazism with extermination of a race.. without evidence or reasoning.. Its horrible..

I feel that the school owes the young man and his family a deep apology for the events...

Now if he had wrapped it with ducktape an antenna and a flashing red light.. maybe some fake C4, dynamite.. then I would say he was hoaxing a bomb... Circuit boards.. really.. OMG your computer is really a bomb.. Hate to see what silicon and printed metal is going to do... What is this an Inception movie?

[KamenRiderBlack]

america's going down the drain.

[elJay]

When I was young, we had to do a creativity class, where you would draw what you like/fell etc. So in my artbox you would have found pictures with trees, fishes, landscapes, people, and some with zombies, where all the picture was red and you get the idea. People just laught when they saw it.... Thank god that I wasn't born in the US.

Note that I passed that class with maximum points and all my drawings were bought by people, including the gore ones.

:why: :dunno:

OK I thanked him

[dMog]

the kid just got an invite to the white house.... hopefully the school. the teachers, and the cops will see they just pooped the bed here

[software182]

[212eta]

Texas is very discriminatory..

I wonder if it is only Texas...

[Ballistic Gelatin]

Texas is very discriminatory..

I wonder if it is only Texas...

Trust me, it's not. The school districts in Texas certainly don't have a monopoly on stupidity and thinly-veiled discrimination. Or unwarranted paranoia.

[flitox]

Our schools (in Texas and the U.S., in general) are so F***ED up.

You can get suspended simply for drawing a PICTURE of a firearm.

In third grade, we had Go Texan Day in February, when the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo commenced. We all got put on our best cowboy garb -- including toy pistols and rifles -- and spend that day's recess playing Cowboys & Indians. If we'd done that today, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) would file suit against the school for sponsoring discriminatory activities.

In sixth grade, we had a monthly "Show and Tell" day. One of my classmates obtained permission from our teacher to bring his .22 cal. rifle to the classroom to explain his target-shooting hobby and the gun's safety features. Today, he would have been expelled.

I truly feel sorry for the Irving, Texas teenager. I hope he and his family sue the HELL out of that F***ING school.

a while after reading that news, i saw another one where a kid in school ate his receal bar and shaped it to look like a gun and got suspend (or something quite similar) for doing so!

i'm still wondering, if the kid had been white or even black, would things have turned this way??

[dMog]

Our schools (in Texas and the U.S., in general) are so F***ED up.

You can get suspended simply for drawing a PICTURE of a firearm.

In third grade, we had Go Texan Day in February, when the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo commenced. We all got put on our best cowboy garb -- including toy pistols and rifles -- and spend that day's recess playing Cowboys & Indians. If we'd done that today, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) would file suit against the school for sponsoring discriminatory activities.

In sixth grade, we had a monthly "Show and Tell" day. One of my classmates obtained permission from our teacher to bring his .22 cal. rifle to the classroom to explain his target-shooting hobby and the gun's safety features. Today, he would have been expelled.

I truly feel sorry for the Irving, Texas teenager. I hope he and his family sue the HELL out of that F***ING school.

a while after reading that news, i saw another one where a kid in school ate his receal bar and shaped it to look like a gun and got suspend (or something quite similar) for doing so!

i'm still wondering, if the kid had been white or even black, would things have turned this way??

Apparently to become a teacher at some schools one must submit to a total brainectomy or have absolutely not an iota of common sense left in your body

[Ballistic Gelatin]

Our schools (in Texas and the U.S., in general) are so F***ED up.

You can get suspended simply for drawing a PICTURE of a firearm.

In third grade, we had Go Texan Day in February, when the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo commenced. We all got put on our best cowboy garb -- including toy pistols and rifles -- and spend that day's recess playing Cowboys & Indians. If we'd done that today, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) would file suit against the school for sponsoring discriminatory activities.

In sixth grade, we had a monthly "Show and Tell" day. One of my classmates obtained permission from our teacher to bring his .22 cal. rifle to the classroom to explain his target-shooting hobby and the gun's safety features. Today, he would have been expelled.

I truly feel sorry for the Irving, Texas teenager. I hope he and his family sue the HELL out of that F***ING school.

a while after reading that news, i saw another one where a kid in school ate his receal bar and shaped it to look like a gun and got suspend (or something quite similar) for doing so!

i'm still wondering, if the kid had been white or even black, would things have turned this way??

Our schools (in Texas and the U.S., in general) are so F***ED up.

You can get suspended simply for drawing a PICTURE of a firearm.

In third grade, we had Go Texan Day in February, when the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo commenced. We all got put on our best cowboy garb -- including toy pistols and rifles -- and spend that day's recess playing Cowboys & Indians. If we'd done that today, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) would file suit against the school for sponsoring discriminatory activities.

In sixth grade, we had a monthly "Show and Tell" day. One of my classmates obtained permission from our teacher to bring his .22 cal. rifle to the classroom to explain his target-shooting hobby and the gun's safety features. Today, he would have been expelled.

I truly feel sorry for the Irving, Texas teenager. I hope he and his family sue the HELL out of that F***ING school.

a while after reading that news, i saw another one where a kid in school ate his receal bar and shaped it to look like a gun and got suspend (or something quite similar) for doing so!

i'm still wondering, if the kid had been white or even black, would things have turned this way??

Apparently to become a teacher at some schools one must submit to a total brainectomy or have absolutely not an iota of common sense left in your body

@flitox: I think you were referring to a "cereal" (or chewy granola bar)? Yes, I recall reading about that incident.

@flitox and dMog: It makes me glad that I am no longer in the public school system. But it makes me madder than HELL because my property taxes are being used to fund the salaries of some of these morons. The problem is that most -- if not all -- school districts adopt a blanket "zero tolerance" policy as a catch-all (and a "cover-your-ass") to address these innocuous infractions. This practice does FAR more harm than good.

Supporters of these misguided policies ALWAYS point to the mass shootings at schools in recent years as the justification for them. Naturally, it is the students themselves who end up suffering the most.

[dMog]

when i was in school every boy i knew had a pocket knife in his pocket... it was just something we grew up with... and i ain't that old that we had to get to school by horse and buggy either..in fact i grew up in a medium sized city...even when i was in high school we could carry a pocket knife...times have changes but even certified moron would have been able to tell this kid did did no wrong in this instance...and let me tell you... recently there was 15 year old got caught for stealing in my work place...when his back pack was opened i saw a freaking pipe bomb in in there... i told the person looking at it and holding it to put it down gently and step away and we called the police... the damn thing was armed the cops got there took one look at the pipe took the kid down hard and evacuated my store called the bomb squad.... the kid was back in school the next day and walking around where i work and not word was said on the news...so this crap goes from one extreme to the other...by bet is the teachers went full bore because they knew they were not in danger form this kid and chose him to send a message to kids they were actually afraid of

[HX1]

Try worse than a pocket knife... :) Guns... acid.. you name it.. not to mention mental warfare.. intimidation, threat to your well-being, and all of the mixed up troubles from all of the kids who are out to get what they want using what they know.. It can be used as a weapon and all of it can spin completely out of control. I remember your financial status being a huge deal as well. Huge mix of problems kids deal with and in our ADULT world there are even more... Some of them still at play in many ways for some.

The unfortunate truth out there is not just in our school systems ( or in Texas, as mentioned before ).. it is going to be in our everyday lives...

In a way you could say this type of ignorance prepares children for what the are to face in the world out there.. BUT in other ways we wind up teaching each other the very same thing. It becomes a socially acceptable thing. Something that we view as just another element in our lives. Something we have to ignore or avoid becoming a part of. Some even pick this up and use it in situations that we possibly should not be in to begin with. Fights, terroristic threats towards one another... Aggression, and competitiveness between races countries.. and so on.. It happens between even sexes.

Hopefully the boy will walk away from this learning about people... and it does not shape his future or views or the quality of life he can lead because of that perception of people in the world. Hopefully a stepping stone in his development.. Something that his teachers have not supported by their actions.

[212eta]

Texas is very discriminatory..

I wonder if it is only Texas...

Trust me, it's not. The school districts in Texas certainly don't have a monopoly on stupidity and thinly-veiled discrimination.

Or unwarranted paranoia.

I've had the same impression... :yes: