The more I look at this, the stupider it gets. So if I understand things correctly, the kid (the 14-year-old kid) cracked open an alarm clock and put it in a pencil case 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday night because he had a homework assignment in Engineering class the next day. he showed the pencil-cased alarm clock to his Engineering teacher. Ahmed, having a vague understanding that muslim kids with technical skillz spook your garden-variety Texan, put it in his bag where the alarm went off in English class. ...so is the Engineering teacher ALSO muslim? 'cuz it seems to me that an English teacher that wasn't an abject douche would ask the guy who assigned the homework. And then a principal who also wasn't an abject douche might maybe check in with said-same Engineering teacher. And that not only would a police department with the vaguest sense that there might be a bomb SHOW UP WITH THE BOMB SQUAD but they might, you know, talk to the guy who assigned the homework to say "Does this look like a clock to you? Because we're all, you know, Texan and just can't tell. Also, mooninites are terrorists." (To be fair, that was Philly but sweet holy jesus)
“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”
“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.
The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.
“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”
Well, I look at it and I go "yep, that's a busted clock." You can see the factory transformer, the factory display, the factory circuit board. An Evil Mad Science kit it's not. The passion project of a 14 year old, not so much. The story I grabbed the quotes from quotes the kid as spending 20 minutes on it. If I were him, I'd wanna be busted for something he'd actually spent some time on. I built a geiger counter in freshman electronics class (took about a week) and I have no doubts that given more than 20 minutes, this kid or any of his classmates could do similar. But the thing they busted him for is literally a gutted alarm clock.
Have you seen the picture of him in handcuffs? Actual, real handcuffs. Unreal.