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14-year-old arrested after homemade clock is mistaken for bomb, prompts #IStandWithAhmed on Twitter

BY Colleen Shalby  September 16, 2015 at 1:35 PM EDT  | Updated: Sep 16, 2015 at 5:26 PM

Fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed’s go-to hobby is invention. His latest creation was a clock, built inside a $5-10 metal box that included a digital display and a circuit board.

On Monday, Mohamed took the clock to his high school in Irving, Texas. But when a teacher mistook it for a hoax bomb, the teenager was arrested, interrogated and taken to a juvenile detention center before his parents retrieved him.

“It made me feel like I wasn’t human. It made me feel like I was a criminal,” Mohamed told Dallas Morning News in an interview today.

Ahmed was suspended for three days.


Video from Dallas Morning News.

On Tuesday, Irving School District and MacArthur High School released a letter to parents informing them that police had responded to a “suspicious looking item” on campus, but that the item discovered “did not pose a threat” to students’ safety.

Not long after, Mohamed’s story began circulating on social media.

Outraged Twitter users have responded to his arrest and suspension with #IStandWithAhmed, and several on Twitter believe that Mohamed was profiled because he is Muslim. President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other public figures also voiced their response.

Mohamad’s family set up an official Twitter account for him.

Today, Irving Police Department said Mohamed would not be charged.

As of this posting, the hashtag has been tweeted over 270,000 times in the past two days.

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