Texas School Has Child Named Ahmed Arrested for Bringing a Homemade Clock to School

A ninth-grader in North Texas was handcuffed and taken to juvenile detention on Monday after bringing a homemade clock to school. Ahmed Mohamed, 14, told the Dallas Morning News that the school principal told him the device looked like “a movie bomb,” even as he repeatedly explained it was a clock.

Avi Selk of the Dallas Morning News reports that Mohamed was questioned and handcuffed at MacArthur High School in Irving after the school phoned police about a clock he’d made out of a pencil case. Mohamed is Muslim; his father emigrated from the Sudan. When he proudly brought the clock to school to show off his handiwork, his engineering teacher told him it was “nice,” he told Selk, but warned him not to show other teachers. And when he showed it to his English teacher after she complained about it beeping in class, all hell broke loose:

“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.’”

Mohamed was handcuffed and dragged out of school after police also decided that maybe it was a “movie bomb.” He was released after being interrogated and fingerprinted. He was not allowed to call his parents during the interrogation and was evidently alone with police during questioning.