High school kid who fixes go-karts and builds radios brings his homemade clock to school to impress his teachers. Engineering teacher is impressed but recommends he not show it to anyone else in school. But it beeps in English class, and the teacher there makes him take it out of his bag. The English teacher says it looks like a bomb, but kid tells her it’s a clock. Teacher keeps the clock.
Later that day, said kid is pulled out of sixth period and interrogated by the principal and four officers without the presence of his parents or a lawyer. Eventually he is taken to juvie in handcuffs to be picked up by his parents. He gets a photo op and his hand inked, but his parents show up before he’s given a free room.
The school’s principal gives him a three day suspension. Police say he may still be charged for making a hoax bomb even though he continually claimed his clock was, well, a clock. I’m sure the fact that his name is Ahmed Mohammed has absolutely no relevance.
Punishment for putting your principal and the cops into a position such that they will look like dumbasses if they admit you did nothing wrong: 3 day suspension.
Just very poor timing really. Whilst I understand the alarm of the authorities, they could have held off for some time until the situation had been brought before the school council and all the minutes of that meeting were available.
Apparently they elected a mayor who has given speeches about how there’s an Islamic conspiracy to take over America or some similar nonsense. From the end of the OP’s link:
It brings to mind the MIT student arrested for supposedly having a hoax “bomb” attached to her hoodie at Logan Airport in Boston several years ago.
Only:
It wasn’t a hoax bomb
It didn’t have “putty” (thought to be Semtex or some other explosive, evidently) – it had stuff that lit up when driven by the battery and the circuit on the circuit board (It said “Socket to Me/ Course 6”. Course six is Electric Engineering at MIT). When asked what the circuit board was, she explained. She undoubtedly wore this shirt at the Institute and around Boston and Cambridge.
She wasn’t trying to get on a planer or anything, she was asking about an incoming flight.
I play around with various forms of model rocket and build my own parachute timers. Little electronic things wired to activate something after a period of time.
If I don’t post for a few weeks, could one of you guys perhaps bail me out?
The whole thing seemed completely silly until I saw the name of the child.
Then it still was silly, but now I get why they were so het up. I’m sure if the kid was named Christopher Jones, they would have patted him on the back and told him great job, kid!
I am positive of this. Don’t post any links to prove me wrong!
The article kind of slipped this in, but for me the part highlighted below (my bolding) practically begs for more info:
Also, not that this justifies the kid’s treatment in any way, but I suspect the paragraphs following the quote above may partly explain the, er, overzealous policing in this matter:
