Worse than detention. An Irving, Texas, ninth grader was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school on Monday, Sept. 14, the Dallas News reports.
Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was taken into custody after the clock was confiscated by his teacher during English class. "She was like, 'It looks like a bomb,'” Mohamed told the Dallas News. "It doesn’t look like a bomb to me."
The young teen was then questioned by police officers outside his classroom. He's currently suspended and could be charged with making a hoax bomb.
Mohamed says that he loves to invent things. In a video, he explained that he put his clock in a box that he bought at Target, but authorities said it looked more like a suitcase. He also went into detail about the incident.
"They interrogated me, searched my stuff, and took my tablet and my invention. And then later that day I was taken to a juvenile detention center. They took my fingerprints and my mugshot," Mohamed recalled. "They searched me until my parents came and I got to leave the station. I went home and talked to my parents about it because I couldn't talk to my parents during the interrogation until I got to see them."
I expect they will have more to say tomorrow, but Ahmed's sister asked me to share this photo. A NASA shirt! pic.twitter.com/nR4gt992gB
— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 16, 2015
He added: "It made me feel like I wasn't human. It made me feel like a criminal." (Blogger Anil Dash shared a photo of Mohamed in handcuffs on Tuesday.)
Mohamed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, felt the same way. "He just wants to invent good things for mankind," he told Dallas News. "But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated."