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9th-Grader May Face Charges After Homemade Clock Mistaken For Bomb
New submitter bengoerz writes: 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was led away from MacArthur High School in handcuffs and faces possible charges after teachers, school administrators, and police in Irving, Texas mistook his homemade clock for a bomb. The device — a circuit board, power supply, and digital display wired together inside a pencil box — was confiscated by a teacher after the alarm sounded in class. Despite telling everyone who would listen that his device was just a clock, Ahmed was confronted by four police officers, suspended for three days, and threatened with expulsion unless he made a written statement, before eventually being transported to a juvenile detention center to meet his parents.
Unfortunately, a lot of the stupid seem to have involved themselves in education.
Brown skin, name like 'Ahmed Mohamed' and home made electronic clock. He is lucky to be alive actually.
He made the mistake of thinking that school was a place for learning and exploration. It is not.
He also made the mistake of not having white skin and having a Muslim-sounding name.
Please don't be a Arab-sounding name. Shit!
Please don't be in Texas. Fock!
Sigh... well played, stereotype, well played.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
That used to mean something in this country. Now the "terrorists" are out to get us from every corner. Benjamin Franklin's quote about safety and liberty applies more and more every day. If it was a Caucasian kid named Billy Martin, would this even be "news"?
I cannot believe the stupidity of the teachers. They should be suspended.
The school should pay damages to cover emotional distress and follow up therapy for the kid.
Well done...
Here's how to reach out to the Irving ISD superintendent to let him know what you think:
Jose Parra
Superintendent of Schools
972-600-5001
jparra@irvingisd.net
This would have been me in 1976. Obviously, it wasn't quite that easy to make a clock back then. But, I was building things all of the time. The knowledge I gained has served me well my entire life. This is the kind of thing we should be encouraging. Tinkerers have helped to make this country what it is. To profile a kid like this into the criminal category is just beyond sad. I hope it doesn't discourage him from exploring his interests down the road. He needs to find a local Maker group. The school and police need to get a clue.
So, he might be charged ... for not making a bomb ... and for telling everybody it's not a bomb?
What the actual fuck? He didn't create a bomb, he didn't create a hoax bomb. Morons incorrectly concluded he made a bomb, he told them repeatedly it wasn't a bomb, but these morons now wish to charge him for the non-making of a non-bomb in a non-hoaxing kind of way?
These police are fucking morons, who if left in public could be accidentally confused with competent law enforcement officers. They should be charged with creating a hoax police department.
Apparently being a nerdy brown kid is now illegal in America. If this was a white Christian kid, he'd be a national fucking hero.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We didn't used to be a bunch of sniveling cowards! There was a time when we used to exude bravery and instead of pissing our pants at the possibility of a problem we shrugged them off and dealt with them as necessary. And now look at us. Some kid brings a science project to school and we have jackasses wondering if he did this to create a stink. Maybe the kid just wanted to experiment with electronics - like a lot of us did when we were kids. Oh right, no one here on SlashDot ever did that. Christ!
http://www.makershed.com/products/defusable-alarm-clock-kit
I have that kit waiting patiently in a drawer for my 12y/o to get the initiative to build it. They even have some cool ideas on wrapping dowels and routing the "defuse" wires through them to make it look like dynamite sticks. Clearly I would tell him never to bring that to school. But now, I'd have to worry about some friend coming over, seeing it and telling his parents. One can only imagine a similarly damaging misunderstanding taking place.
Seems we have already lost the war...
What are the chances he was just making a clock? Clocks are relatively simple projects that are made by millions of hobbyists to learn about electronics. One can learn a lot from such a simple project - soldering, reading and understanding electronic component data sheets, programming- all are required in such a project.
Just as water is a common ingredient in insecticides, the fact that clocks happen to be used in some bombs is testament to their broad range of uses.
You know, cell phones are commonly used to make remote bomb triggers (for some of the bombs that don't have clock timers). Is every kid in that school carrying a cell phone intending to blow people up? Maybe we should put them all in cuffs until we can sort this mess out.
Why punish this kid? He did nothing wrong. Punish the hysterical school officials who lack the sense to tell a clock from a bomb for wasting police time.
Clearly you lack experience with cops.
Recipients: dacummings@irvingisd.net, othomas@irvingisd.net, mespino@irvingisd.net, sheller@irvingisd.net, awong@irvingisd.net, psmith@irvingisd.net
(from http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/2031 )
Email message:
To whom it concerns,
I had to read this article about a boy who tinkers with electronics as a hobby:
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-9th-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school-so-you-tried-to-make-a-bomb.ece
I hope it is not standard practice of the school to traumatize kids the way this has been dealt with. Kids who take up interests in sciences should be supported. Not jailed.
Remember the 2007 Boston 'bomb'? The LED light sign advertising Aqua Teen Hunger Force?
When they realized they were just signs, and the police chief and mayor had been idiots, they switched the claim to "intent to plant a hoax device to cause panic", so the panic they were spreading by claiming it was a bomb, they then twisted that to pretend that panic came from the people placing the LED signs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
They dig a hole for themselves, and they dig it deeper and deeper until they come across as unfit to run a city or school.
Here, you see the same thing:
"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?”
******
They know its not a bomb, so they go for the "might be mistaken for a bomb if placed under a car" angle. Some fictional extra bit, that might turn a non-bomb into something that might be mistaken for a bomb by someone as idiot as themselves.
I'm better they watch Fox News.
The only reason everyone thought it was a bomb first was because of his name. It's sad in 2015 we still can't be adult and mature.
Presumably he made this for a class, and if so, why didn't that teacher stand up for him and tell them it was for his class?
And if it wasn't for a class or club or something, that does admittedly seem a bit suspicious.
He brought it to school to show the teacher in his engineering class, and then kept it out of sight in his bag. The alarm on the clock beeped during an English class later in the day, so he showed the project to his English teacher after class by way of explanation.
The only obviously wrong thing he did was (presumably inadvertently) let the alarm go off during a class. If he were a kid with a cell phone, the teacher would confiscate the phone for the rest of the class and possibly assign some other standard, trivial punishment. And that would be fine. Instead, we have a hopelessly irrational overreaction, almost certainly enhanced by the kid's race.
~Idarubicin
Salem Witch Trials, Mass Murder of Scientists, Islamophobia, 2007 Boston Bomb Scare, and now this.
The teacher confiscated the "bomb" which sat in their drawer until the end of class when it was taken to administration. If the teacher truly believed that the device could have even remotely been a bomb, they would not have touched it, would have evacuated the school, and would have called bomb squad. The teacher, the administration, and the police are complicit in perpetuating a fraud - a fraud against a child.
Even in the case that the clock resembled a "movie bomb" or was purposely contracted to do so, the child did nothing wrong as long as he didn't hint at it being a bomb or use it to threaten anyone. There are plenty of clocks on the market that resemble a bomb. Yes, it may have been a lark. Yes, it may have been a protest to create awareness. No, it wasn't malicious. No, it wasn't threatening. And no, it obviously wasn't convincing.
I seriously hope that he follows in his father's footsteps and keeps challenging the status quo.
[Rent This Space]
They burned.
If I could tell Ahmed anything it would be keep inventing, outside of school. Apparently school is not the place for learning or inventing and is actively hostile to this. If you keep learning outside of school, you will become successful while the school, and those who don't learn for themselves, will keep falling behind.
Land of the free? Nope.
Home of the brave? Haha nope.
"He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again."
Reading that article gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. It sounded like they were describing a grisly murder when they were detailing the exact manner in which a school's ignorance and racism crushed the spirit and enthusiasm of a smart and motivated kid. Then I read that last line. That might be one of the most profoundly sad things I've ever read.
What do you expect? It was Texas, and they weren't sure what a clock could be used for.
Let me introduce to you to the principal of the school:
Now let me introduce you to the mayor of Irving, Texas:
Finally, let's let Irving, Texas Police Office James McLellan speak for himself:
Get that? It's a clock and Officer McLellan wasn't sure "what was this thing built for"? So they took him into custody.
They suspended the kid for three days.
Jesus wept. Texas is a shithole.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I will tell you want he should do next!
1) Make a list of exactly what it takes to make a clock like this
2) Talk to his friends, who talk to their friends, etc. and spread the list
3) Have as many of the high school students show up at a location on a Saturday and all build clocks
4) Have all of these students show up at school on Monday with their clocks
5) Have all the kids en-mass show their teachers the clocks they made right as school is starting. Make sure they all know, it is a clock.
6) Wait for the administration and police to react.
Problem solved. they can't suspend that many kids at once. The Police can't handle that many kids at once. If they don't respond the exact same way as they did to the first clock, then the lawsuits will fly! They can't respond to that many clocks being brought to school in the same manner so the police and school then have to say, yeah, it isn't that big a deal or they have to let their true crazy shine!
I think you maybe even get as many of the parents as you can to show up at school drop off with clocks as well!
Seriously? You're looking at children, seriously looking at children, and thinking that they're deliberately trying to walk a line that could get them charged with life-ruining crimes?
Here's a simpler explanation: children in the U.S. are now so conditioned to be scared of authority that even those still daring enough to give into the natural childhood instinct to show off what they can achieve are pre-emptively trying to avoid being mistaken as a threat by the very people they are supposed to look up to.
And really, neither possibility suggests anything good about our society.
Maybe the people educating our youth shouldn't be basing their opinion of what is and isn't dangerous from Hollywood movies? Just a thought...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"racism"? Gimme a f***ing break. How about "intelligencism"?
In these sad times when public school "zero tolerance" policies punish kids for "gun-shaped" things made out of legos or cardboard, is it any surprise that morons freak out over a circuit board with batteries and wires hooked into a 7 segment display? Could just as easily have been a white kid.
Smart kid. I hope he gets a six figure settlement and a scholarship to pursue EE out of this fiasco.
He wasn't just any "nerdy brown kid". His father is fairly well known as a spokesman trying to calm anti-islam rhetoric. Of course that shouldn't make the kid any more of a suspect, the teachers and police clearly over reacted because they knew the family. But again, he wasn't just some random kid.
Noted on Twitter last night that many people have found inexpensive electronic clock kits, and are sending them to Irving High to help the teachers learn about what clocks are, that they're not terribly threatening, and to help their kids learn to build them.
That address is:
Irving High School
900 N O Connor Rd
Irving, TX 75061
or they would have evacuated the school and sent in the bomb-squad. They knew it wasn't a bomb the entire time.
Jose Parra
2621 W. Airport Freeway
Irving, TX 75062
Perhaps they just haven't seen many before, and it would be helpful if we all mailed Dr. Parra a clock so that he could have a baseline for what a clock might look like. Breadboard or wire-wrapped versions preferred.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The school system had the kid arrested. They suspended him for three days and forced him to sign a statement under duress. They allowed the police to interrogate him, on school property, without legal representation or the presence of an adult guardian. You know what they never did?
Evacuate the school
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Where the hell is the picture of the "bomb clock"? I see a picture of the kid next to circuit board. If that is the "bomb clock" then a lot of adults need to get slapped upside the head.
The point being, what he is sitting next to could not conceivably be considered a bomb by anybody with a brain between their ears. Now, if the "clock" was a display protruding from a small box, where you can't see what is going on inside the box (as the story implies), then maybe (just maybe) there was a tiny shred of justification for their actions. However, maybe a more appropriate response (assuming the thing actually resembled a bomb) would have been to say "hey son, could you please show me what's inside the box?" If you were TRULY worried about it being a bomb, maybe evacuating the school and calling in the bomb squad would have been appropriate. I would expect any of those responses by the teachers if the kid was white, black, brown, purple, or green. But no, these backwards mother fuckers see a brown kid with a "muslim sounding" name and all hell breaks loose.
If the second teacher TRULY thought this was a bomb, why the fuck would you put it in your desk and leave it there for hours? They need to be fired, immediately, for failing to act responsibly in a "dangerous" situation. If the police were TRULY worried that this device was a bomb they all need to be fired, immediately, for failing to properly handle a suspected explosive device.
Oh, reading the story again, nobody ever thought it was ACTUALLY a bomb, they just thought it kinda looked like one. First teacher probably should be talked to, if he thought the device could be perceived as a threat (saying "you probably shouldn't show that to any one else") he should have confiscated it on the spot. Second teacher acted appropriately. Knew it wasn't actually a bomb, just thought it looked like one, so she confiscated it and reported it to the principle. I would expect the same thing to happen to someone that brought in something that could be perceived as a bomb, gun, knife, whatever. Principal? Yeah, he needs to be fired. Threatening to expel a student for not providing a written statement? Yeah, not cool. Intimidating a 14 year old by forcing a written statement without a parent present? I'd be pissed if they did that to my kids. The police involved, definitely reprimanded. Interrogating a minor without a parent present, big no-no. Arresting him without charging him with a crime? Also a no-no.
It was a circuit board in a pencil case.
A) You can see the whole thing.
B) A Pencil case is not large enough to house anything with much power even if it were for some reason explosive.
To call in the police? Absurd.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and I've come to the conclusion that this is really how America ends. Wallowing in its own stupidity, locked down by the authorities because we're afraid of everything we don't understand (which is everything, due to ignorance), and decrying any interest in something other than pop culture as suspicious.
When I was a kid some forty years ago, it was still possible to learn, make, see, and do things without nine layers of security clearances and being met with "you can't do X because terrorists/drugs" at every turn. Now, the only reasonable explanation for why you're interested in something is because you do it for work. And because some company makes you do it for money, now it's suddenly okay. Building anything with wires sticking out that beeps? Terrorist.
Learning chemistry at home? Terrorist or maybe the next Walter White. Interest in trucks/trains/planes and not a truck driver/engineer/pilot? Terrorist. Interested in power generation/distribution but not a power EE? Terrorist. Interested in computer security research? Cyberterrorist! Aiieeee! I could go on and on and on here...
Hey wait a minute - you know how most of the good people in those fields got there? Because it's what interested them before they did it as a job. In the past, there were always ways to learn about these things, particularly as a kid. Folks willing to show you around, show you what they did, explain how things worked, and sometimes let you help. I can't tell you the number of things I got to try out as a kid that would now get somebody fired and probably grilled by some three letter agency. But it's because of those experiences that I'm a successful electrical engineer today who loves it as both his profession and passion. I didn't just pick a job off the list, say "that looks good and pays well", and then decide to spend my life doing it. The folks I know who did that have already washed out and gone looking for something they enjoy more.
The next generation is boned. Their curiosity about things is being actively destroyed when its met with suspicion and investigation rather than encouragement or better - "Ssh, don't tell anybody, but put this hard hat on and come with me..." This is just one example.
Yeah, there's definitely a racist problem here as well (it *IS* Texas, folks...), but I think focusing on that is missing the real point. It's not just non-white kids. The powers that be have taught us to regard everything with suspicion rather than curiosity. Yet I ask you - how many kids have you seen today who are terrorists vs. how many have you seen who need to learn about the world and figure out what they want to do with their lives?
When "guns" made of pop-tarts, cardboard and legos can get a kid in trouble, is it ANY surprise that a pencil box containing a circuit board, batteries and 7-seg displays causes a similar freak-out?
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
A friend of mine and I (white kids) once got sent to the principal's office just for talking to the chemistry teacher. You can't buy nitric acid just anywhere and we knew we couldn't distill it with an apparatus made of metal pipes and containers. We were wondering if the acid would eat through that clear flexible plastic tubing that you can get at the hardware store and thinking maybe he'd give us a few drops to experiment. He didn't believe our story that we were polishing silver coins (even though that was EXACTLY what we wanted to do!)
This was before Columbine or 9/11, so a chat with the teacher & principal and a note to our parents (tell your kids not to f*** around with chemicals in your basement) was the extent of the discipline.
Imagine what could happen today for cris'sakes! I can easily imagine the police arresting kids like us for conspiracy to make explosives or some such nonsense.
In Texas, STEM must mean "Syberterrorism, Terrorism, Even More terrorism" ... or maybe the M stands for 'Meth"; which is what you're doing if you even hint at liking chemistry.
In a country that is falling further and further behind the rest of the world in education, I find it particularly humorous (if it wasn't so sad) that we are spending billions on programs to push up the standards of schools; then we go and arrest the only students who show even a glimmer of intelligence.
Just so I've got this right, the only thing you're allowed to be interested in, while in school, is football.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
When the police interrogated him in the principals office, one said "yeah, I knew it was him". His dad was the guy who argued with the preacher in Florida who burned a Koran. This is the town that had an issue with some "Sharia law" courts some people had set up at mosques, and their mayor got into a big "Fox news" style fight with them over it being an alternate court "outside the Constitution". Anyway, there are news sites in Dallas with info about his interrogation, other people can look for them but it's pretty obvious what just went down. And with four or five cops, the principal, a teacher, all shoved into one office that is interrogation. Possibly illegal, but I'm sure some lawyer will soon find the specific statues about all that. The dad has some "big friends" with deep pockets, and this probably will end up in a court room soon.
Putting on my tin foil hat, and properly grounding it, I theorize that the city government has already "profiled" him, his dad, and his whole family after the burning holy book deal a few years ago. After the mayor freaked out and went to the state of Texas to get an "anti foreign law" bill passed, anyone that remotely looks like their from the Middle East is probably on some Irving police list. The school itself was probably briefed by the police, and the principal and teacher may have already known about the book burning argument etc. He was told by the first teacher to "not show it to anyone else" but later an alarm on the clock went off in class.
This could also be part of an even greater plot by the specific Muslim groups to push a persecution complex and the kid was in on it or encouraged. I'm sure Bill O'Reilly will say something like this soon. But I try to always apply Hanlon’s Razor to why he would program an alarm to go off in class. But this whole thing just reaks. Both of these "sides" down in that area of Texas keep baiting each other. Same area of the "draw Mohamed" shootings, "foreign law courts" who claim to just be third party arbitrators...both groups have apocalyptic Armageddon leanings. And it's Texas, so chances are everyone is heavily armed.
The state of oklahoma says YES.
A few years ago it was policy that in the event of an emergency all the cellphones would be taken from the students as the possibility that one of them might use one to detonate a bomb outweighed the safety benefits of them being able to call for help. I understand that now they require all students to register their phones with the office at the beginning of the year.
At the nearest school to me;
Fences were built around the walkways between the buildings and a magnetic door lock with buzz in were added to the main entry ways alternate entries stay locked now.
No metal detectors yet...however the school in town has had them for a few years now.
Its a good thing no one there ever heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory or they might have had to add emergency exits in case of fire.
But fire is an imaginary danger the real threat is terrorists.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Anytime anything goes wrong, we all get into this frenetic search to find a scapegoat, "if only this bureaucrat had done this instead of that ..." We have trained the whole system to act in the CYA mode.
I am not saying the teacher made a honest mistake. I am saying we all share a little of the blame. We had a part in creating this system, this CYA mentality. Let us remember this incident next time some bureaucrat makes a common sense decision that blows up on his/her face.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.
more at #IStandWithAhmed
your numbers are laughably wrong. or, they would be laughable, if they weren't so horribly racist.
if there were "literally millions" of radical muslims that wanted to kill you, we would all be totally fucked. thankfully, the ACTUAL number of radical terrorists is incredibly low, as can be seen by the fact that actual terrorist attacks are virtually nonexistant. a statistical blip. you are far more likely to die from a lightning strike.
That was me in 1975 onward through high school. I used to cut or etch my own circuit boards, and made everything from (yes) digital clocks to power supplies to radio receivers. The fact that 95 IQ cops and brain dead school administrators can ruin a bright child's life just infuriates me. Stick a fork in it, 'Murica, you're dead.