Two months after clock kid Ahmed Mohamed made international headlines, details of his controversial arrest emerged Monday in a letter his attorney has sent to school and city officials in Irving, Texas.
As many as seven adults teamed up to interrogate the 14-year-old boy after a teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb and pressured him to sign a confession, according to the letter of demand from his lawyer warning of plans to file a $15 million suit.
Ahmed's arrest in September, deemed an overreaction by many observers, drew waves of sympathy and extensive news coverage. President Obama invited him to join several other science-inclined students at the White House's Astronomy Night last month.
But his family, which shortly thereafter took up a benefactor's offer to relocate to Qatar, argued in the letter that the boy's reputation has been permanently scarred. They are seeking not only financial reparations but written apologies from the city's mayor and police chief.
The letters elaborate on the timeline of the arrest, which set the Internet into a frenzy and changed a 14-year-old boy's life forever. Though the family left the United States in October, the story is still reverberating in Ahmed's hometown, where a group carrying guns and anti-Muslim signs staged a protest outside a mosque this past weekend.
The letter of demand alleges that officials at Ahmed's school never really thought that his homemade clock, assembled from spare parts and scrap pieces he had around the house, was a bomb. Attorneys claim that Ahmed showed it to another teacher earlier in the day without consequence. But in his English class, a teacher told him it looked like a bomb.
The basis for (the teacher's) actions is unclear. She certainly did not treat the clock as though it were dangerous. Ms. West initially placed the clock on her desk, the letter states.
A week after the arrest, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne told Glenn Beck that another side of the story was not being told. She referred to the item as a hoax bomb, not a clock, and said that Ahmed was not cooperative during questioning by police.
He told a lot more to the reporters than he ever told to the police, Van Duyne said. There's a problem with that. If your child was in that school and you saw something like this come in, you would want to make sure it is our priority to make our children safe in school, period.
The family is demanding an apology from Van Duyne and others involved because they would like to return to Irving, attorney Kelly Hollingsworth said.
As many as seven adults teamed up to interrogate the 14-year-old boy after a teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb and pressured him to sign a confession, according to the letter of demand from his lawyer warning of plans to file a $15 million suit.
Ahmed's arrest in September, deemed an overreaction by many observers, drew waves of sympathy and extensive news coverage. President Obama invited him to join several other science-inclined students at the White House's Astronomy Night last month.
But his family, which shortly thereafter took up a benefactor's offer to relocate to Qatar, argued in the letter that the boy's reputation has been permanently scarred. They are seeking not only financial reparations but written apologies from the city's mayor and police chief.
The letters elaborate on the timeline of the arrest, which set the Internet into a frenzy and changed a 14-year-old boy's life forever. Though the family left the United States in October, the story is still reverberating in Ahmed's hometown, where a group carrying guns and anti-Muslim signs staged a protest outside a mosque this past weekend.
The letter of demand alleges that officials at Ahmed's school never really thought that his homemade clock, assembled from spare parts and scrap pieces he had around the house, was a bomb. Attorneys claim that Ahmed showed it to another teacher earlier in the day without consequence. But in his English class, a teacher told him it looked like a bomb.
The basis for (the teacher's) actions is unclear. She certainly did not treat the clock as though it were dangerous. Ms. West initially placed the clock on her desk, the letter states.
A week after the arrest, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne told Glenn Beck that another side of the story was not being told. She referred to the item as a hoax bomb, not a clock, and said that Ahmed was not cooperative during questioning by police.
He told a lot more to the reporters than he ever told to the police, Van Duyne said. There's a problem with that. If your child was in that school and you saw something like this come in, you would want to make sure it is our priority to make our children safe in school, period.
The family is demanding an apology from Van Duyne and others involved because they would like to return to Irving, attorney Kelly Hollingsworth said.