By Matt Ferner

Irving, Texas Mayor Beth Van Duyne is defending law enforcement and school officials who were involved in the arrest and suspension of Ahmed Mohamed, a Muslim 14-year-old ninth-grader who brought a homemade clock to school that teachers mistook for a bomb. 

“I do not fault the school or the police for looking into what they saw as a potential threat,” Van Duyne wrote in a statement posted to her Facebook page Wednesday. 

Van Duyne said school and law enforcement officials were simply following school protocols when a “possible threat” or “criminal act” is discovered.

“To the best of my knowledge, they followed protocol for investigating whether this was an attempt to bring a Hoax Bomb to a school campus,” Van Duyne wrote. “I hope this incident does not serve as a deterrent against our police and school personnel from maintaining the safety and security of our schools.”

Ahmed, who told The Dallas Morning News that he loves robotics and tinkering with gadgets, decided to build a clock by linking a circuit board, a power supply and a digital clock display together inside a pencil case. He thought he might impress some teachers by bringing the clock to school.  

Instead, he found himself pulled out of class and taken to the principal’s office, where he says he was threatened with expulsion and interrogated — all the while insisting that he had, in fact, only built a clock. School officers sent him to a detention center, where they took his fingerprints and a mugshot. He was later released to his parents and all charges were dropped against him when police realized the clock wasn’t a bomb after all.

Ahmed was suspended for three days from MacArthur High School by Irving School District administrators.

“We have all seen terrible and violent acts committed in schools,” Van …read more

Source:: Weed Feed