President Obama was not the only powerful person urging Mohamed not to be discouraged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published the following status update on 16 September 2015: Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. #Thankyouforstandingwithme #IStandWithAhmed - Ahmed Mohamed September 16, 2015Īmong those who voiced support for the teen was President Barack Obama, who sent him an invite to the White House via Twitter:Ĭool clock, Ahmed. Thank you for your support! I really didn’t think people would care about a muslim boy. In just a few hours, the account had attracted more than 30,000 followers:
On 16 September 2015, Mohamed’s sisters Eyman and Ayisha (18 and 17, respectively) started a Twitter account to communicate with supporters on behalf of Ahmed. This is the photo of clock passed out by the at this morning’s press conference /9bs2LEvi9PĬhief Larry Boyd described Mohamed’s homemade clock as “certainly suspicious in nature,” adding that the teacher “was concerned that was possibly the infrastructure for a bomb.” Boyd described Mohamed as “not forthcoming” during an interrogation, stating the teen was “taken into custody for possession of a hoax bomb.” However, Boyd said that further investigation “revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment” and that there was “no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm”: Photographs of the purportedly suspicious device were distributed at that conference: On 16 September 2015, Irving Independent School District (ISD) representatives and police appeared at a joint press conference to address the incident involving Mohamed. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody? We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb.He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation … It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The paper quoted police spokesman James McLellan, who stated: Mohamed described the arrest in a video published by Dallas Morning News: Irving, TX, with one of the most virulently Islamophobic mayors in the U.S., handcuffs a teen for his invention. Tech blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash was among those who tweeted to boost the story’s early signal: News of the boy’s arrest and interrogation spread quickly in technology/maker circles. People are tweeting #IStandWithAhmed for a Muslim teen arrested for bringing a clock to school /S1cPtRciNl
Social media users were rapidly moved by Mohamed’s experience, and a jarring image of the teen handcuffed at the police station (while wearing a NASA shirt) began circulating along with tweets including the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed: “They interrogated me, and searched through my stuff and took my tablet and my invention.”
“They took me to a room filled with five officers,” he said. In a video posted on the newspaper’s website, Ahmed described how he was eventually taken from school by the police. “She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said. According to the New York Times, Mohamed’s English teacher discovered the boy’s device when it “beeped,” and someone (it was unclear who) at the school then called police:Īhmed said he brought the clock, which he had fashioned with a digital face in an inexpensive box, to school on Monday to show to an engineering teacher, who said it was “nice” but then told him that he should not show the invention to other teachers.īut when it beeped during an English class, Ahmed revealed the device to his English teacher, according to an account in The Dallas Morning News. The device was in fact a home-assembled clock, not a bomb or a counterfeit bomb. On 14 September 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a ninth-grade student at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, was arrested after school officials confiscated what they described as a “hoax bomb” from him.
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