Teachers mistake 14-year-old maker’s homemade digital clock for a bomb and have him arrested

Earlier this week, a 14-year-old maker named Ahmed Mohammed was pulled out of class and arrested after showing off a digital clock he’d built from scratch the night before. His teachers, employees of at the Irving MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, feared he was trying to build a bomb.

Ahmed isn’t your typical high school freshman; he proudly wears NASA T-shirts and even dabbles in DIY projects, having previously constructed his own radios and Bluetooth-enabled devices. Seeking to earn the respect of an engineering teacher at a school he only recently began, Ahmed quickly assembled a circuit board, power supply, and digital display into a working clock; but rather than impressing the teacher, Ahmed was met with a wearisome look and instructed not to tell the other teachers.

Later that day, the clock began beeping and snagged an English teacher’s attention. After confiscating the clock on the basis of “look[ing] like a bomb,” the slightly confused Ahmed was left to his devices before suddenly being pulled out of a later class by the school’s principal, and escorted to five police officers.

Unaware of what a DIY digital clock or anything maker-related even looks like, the officers proceeded to question Ahmed in accusatory tones, demanding to know why he tried to make a bomb. “I told them no, I was trying to make a clock,” explained Ahmed to Dallas Morning News, but his interrogators responded with “it looks like a movie bomb to me,” before arresting the student, handcuffing him, and transporting him to the station for fingerprinting.

A later police report reveals that when the device was presented to Ahmed during questioning, the youth “kept maintaining it was a clock,” and “offered no broad explanation.” Police statements suggest that the clock “could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car,” and that Ahmed may be charged with building a “hoax bomb.”

One would assume that law enforcement should be at least semi-capable of identifying bombs.

In the wake of the event, Ahmed was suspended from school for three days. A newly created hashtag #IStandWithAhmed has begun circulating Twitter calling for the support of fellow makers and geeks.

Source: Dallas Morning News