Still at this??
Y’all are embarrassing.
You are projecting onto Ahmed. You cannot say what is happening in his head. And I have watched plenty of bad movies, and bad movie bombs have explosives attached. You need to watch better bad movies, my friend.
Seems so. But they still should not have handcuffed him.
Even if they completely believed that he intended the device to be a hoax bomb they should not even have begun questioning him without his parents present.
I believe handcuffing is standard procedure. Not to have handcuffing him while taking him into custody would have been a break from proper procedure. Do you believe because he has brown skin and is Muslim is reason to break from proper procedure?
They should not have taken him into custody.
Perhaps. You are correct, I do not know what he was thinking. Neither do you or anyone else at the school when they had to decide what to do. That is why they asked him what he was thinking. Apparently, he did not want to tell anyone anything excpet “It’s a cool clock I built.”
Again, you are confusing a real bomb with a prop. He did not want it to look like a real bomb. That would have been bad.
However, he did intend it to have an appearance that resembled what passes for bombs in the movies. Yes, if he had anything in the case that could have been confused for an explosive, that would have been a big problem. But, to deny that the device resembled a movie prop is not facing reality. Combine this with the fact that this occurred the first school day after the 14th anniversary of 9/11 and the school administrators would have been derelict in their duties if they did not try to find out if there was some underlying reason for his actions. Where there other students that were bullying him? Was he trying to make a point?
And, being handcuffed and arrested for not assisting in what could be a serious investigation is not the worst thing that could happen. He was not abused. He was not tazered. If he can’t be questioned without his parents being present, what is a teacher supposed to do when a kid doesn’t turn in his homework? No, you can’t question the kid as to why he didn’t turn it in (heck, you can’t even ask him if he has it), you have to wait until the parents arrive? That’s nuts!
This is perhaps the stupidest statement I’ve seen in a long time.
So you’re saying that he wanted to make it look like a bomb that someone who wanted something to look like a bomb would make it look like without making it look like a bomb so that adults looking at it would think that it looked like a bomb would look like if designed by someone who wanted it to look like a bomb so that they would think that he thought that he was making it look like a bomb but that it didn’t actually look like an actual bomb because then the device that looked like a bomb would actually look like a bomb which is what he didn’t want.
Got it.
This is not correct, because the police made a statement to the press about exactly what they thought. It’s even in the article that I posted at the very beginning of this thread. You did read the article, yes?
Note that the article has changed since I originally posted it, but if you scroll down you can see the original article.
Some of the posts in this thread reflect either the failure of the American education system, or inbreeding, or both.
Sorry, I misread your statement. I thought you said that no one knows what the school officials were thinking. Too late to edit.
No, but the fact that he was not a flight risk or dangerous is. It’s not uncommon to see people arrested without handcuffs.
Not that he should have been taken into custody in the first place. You can maybe argue that he should have been taken for questioning (though he would need his parents present). But you don’t someone take into custody unless you have reasonable suspicion.
And you don’t get that from someone not answering your questions. You have a right to remain silent. Every guide to dealing with cops I’ve seen says to not give cops extra information. If that’s enough to get you arrested, why would even cops tell you to do this? They make fun of people who volunteer information!
The one thing I thought we all agreed upon was that the police handled this poorly once they were involved.
(All excludes doorhinge, since he’s been on my ignore list for a while. And I tend to skip posts replying to him.)
I’m not denying it looks like a movie prop. This is just entirely irrelevant, because the authority figures did not think it was a bomb, and he never said it was a bomb. He didn’t plant it anywhere for any kid to see it who might have mistakenly thought it was a bomb. There is just no evidence he ever tried to pass it off as a bomb.
Making something that looks like a movie prop is not a crime. Neither is not answering police questions. But you think he deserved to be arrested. It’s his own fault.
I didn’t know we had another Smapti.
You can take anything that’s relatively straightforward and add a lot of verbiage to make it seem impossibly convoluted. But people do things on two levels at once, while maintaining deniability, all the time. Guys bend over “to tie their shoes” and sneak a peek at a young woman’s ass. Slimier guys make it difficult to impossible to prove their 3rd degree sexual assault, by “stumbling” and “happening to bump into” a woman on the subway. On this very board, but in other sections that are more tightly moderated, people try to sneak in insults all the time, while maintaining a veneer of supposedly talking about something innocent.
Getting back to this actual case, I have no proof that there was a multilevel deniable scam going on here. But the scenario is not that complicated–it’s just complicated enough to fit perfectly into the wheelhouse of a clever and mischievous 14-year-old boy, which describes Ahmed to a T. “Hehehe, I’ll bring in something that looks kind of like a movie bomb, but when they question me I’ll play innocent and say it’s just a clock…and no matter how closely they look at my prop they won’t be able to prove my intent.”
It also fits perfectly into Ahmed’s explanation (minus the hyperbole), that it was just a clock he tinkered with.
I still don’t understand why you’re so quick to assume the more negative interpretation – the only thing I can think of is that you have bad feelings about his dad, so you assume that the kid is rotten too. But I think you should have some hesitance and embarrassment about assuming the worst about a kid who, unless one assumes bad motives of which there exists no evidence, did absolutely nothing wrong.
It’s almost like he needs it to be true, for some weird reason.
That’s what I tried to tell the guys at airport security.
Why do you assume I have “bad feelings about his dad”, or about Ahmed? I think one or both of them are pulling a fast one, and that a lot of people are being naive or willfully obtuse; but that doesn’t mean I’m seething with anger or resentment toward them. They pulled a prank that turned the heat on some bigoted Texans–cool, well done. I just don’t want to be thought to be one of the people who’s suckered. I’m basically saying “leave me out, I saw what you did there”. ::shrug::
I see no evidence that points to “pulling a fast one” as more likely than the ‘Ahmed brought a tinker-thing to school to show to teachers because he’s interested in electronics’ story, and plenty of evidence for the reverse. So I don’t understand how one can believe that the “pulling a fast one” is more likely, unless one has particularly negative feelings about the motivations of the individuals involved.