In the hopes of showcasing his love for inventing things, a Muslim ninth-grader brought a homemade clock to school. But when the clock’s alarm interrupted one of his classes, school administrators thought it was a bomb and had him arrested.
Ahmed Mohamed brought the clock to MacArthur High School on Monday, hoping to impress his teachers. Unfortunately, his engineering teacher, who commended Mohamed for the invention, advised him not to show other teachers, so he put the clock in his backpack. To his dismay, the alarm went off during his English class, and the teacher told him the clock looked like a bomb. During his sixth period, he was escorted out of a classroom by his principal and an officer, searched, interrogated by four officers, and threatened with expulsion.
Mohamed maintained that his invention was a clock, but police thought he was withholding information. That afternoon, he was handcuffed, escorted out of the school, and sent to a juvenile detention center.
“He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation,” police spokesman James McLellan told the Dallas Morning News. “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?”
“They searched me, they took a fingerprint and mugshots of me, and they searched me until my parents came….I couldn’t call my parents during interrogation,” Mohamed later explained. “It made me feel like I wasn’t human. It made me feel like a criminal.”
I expect they will have more to say tomorrow, but Ahmed's sister asked me to share this photo. A NASA shirt! pic.twitter.com/nR4gt992gB
— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 16, 2015
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, the boy’s father, said of the incident. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
This is not the first time a young student of color was thought to have endangered classmates because of a science project. A similar incident occurred two years ago, when a black 16-year-old honor student, Kiera Wilmot, created a chemical mixture in class out of curiosity. The chemical reaction, made in a bottle, sounded like a firecracker when it blew off the bottle cap, and it started to smoke. Nobody was injured, but Wilmot was subsequently arrested and charged for possessing or discharging weapons or firearms and possessing a destructive device on school premises. The charges were eventually dropped, but Wilmot was haunted by the experience.
“They didn’t read me any rights. They arrested me after sitting in the office for a couple minutes. They handcuffed me. It cut my wrist, and really hurt sitting on my hands behind my back,” she later wrote in a Huffington Post piece.
