high school freshman arrested after taking homemade clock to school

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Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday. Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case. He loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school. So he decided to do what he’s always done: He built something. Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bed on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front. He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward. “She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said. “I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’” The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back. They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.” Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions. Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”

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