He was just a member of his middle school’s robotics club. So why did his school react so drastically when he bought an innocuous invention to school?

A 14-year-old boy has been arrested after bringing to school what police suspected was a homemade bomb.

The boy – a Muslim – brought the device to his school in Texas on Monday.

The suspected “home-made bomb,” complete with wires and a small case, was seen by an English teacher at the school after it made a beeping sound.

When the teacher saw it, the police were called.

Ahmed was handcuffed and arrested. The boy, a lover of science, was wearing a NASA t-shirt at the time.

Within minutes, the teenaged boy was handcuffed. He was taken from the school to a juvenile detention centre, where he was fingerprinted and threatened with charges of making a “hoax bomb.”

The boy, Ahmed Mohamed, tried to explain time and time again what the device was — but nobody listened.

His “device” gave the school the impetus to suspend him and a letter was to parents at the school suggesting that Ahmed might have violated a “code of conduct” by making a “suspicious device”.

It took three days for anyone to listen to Ahmed about what the device really was.

Three days while he was suspected of illegal activities. Three days while he was threatened with expulsion.

Three days while he just kept telling people the same thing that they wouldn’t believe.

It was a clock.

A regular, non-explosive clock.

Ahmed told The Dallas Morning News he showed his clock to his engineering teacher first. It was a simple device that only took 20 minutes to build, and it featured a circuit board and a power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a pencil case with a tiger hologram on the front.

The engineering teacher told him it was cool, but advised him not to show any other teachers at the school, so Ahmed kept it in his bag.

During English class later that morning his teacher heard it beep, so Ahmed showed her his homemade clock.

That’s when the teacher took it from him and alerted the principal.

Five police officers came for the boy, dressed in uniform and armed. Ahmed was arrested, handcuffed and marched from the building to a juvenile detention center. He was fingerprinted, asked over and over again about his last name and and wasn’t allowed to call his parents.

Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, Ahmed’s father, says his son suffered because of “prejudice against Muslims.”

“Because his name is Mohamed and because of September 11th,” Mohamed told The Dallas Morning News, “I think my son got mistreated.”

Muram Irbahim, a 15-year-old cousin of Mohamed’s who was part of his middle school robotics team, said Ahmed’s arrest shocked her.

“It just shocked me that people could do this to him. He’s a 14-year-old boy, and he’s a genius.”

The clock.

Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said that Ahmed was being “uncooperative” and “posed a threat” — so much so that he had to be “handcuffed for his safety.”

He told AP that when approached about the device “the student would only say that it was a clock and was not forthcoming at that time about any other details.”

Many commentators are now questioning what other details a 14-year-old boy is meant to offer five armed police men questioning him in a locked room.

You can just imagine the conversation:

“What’s the device Ahmed?”

“A clock sir.”

“A clock?”

Chief Boyd has now said that Ahmed should have been “forthcoming” by going beyond the description that what he made was a clock.

But Boyd now says that authorities have determined that the teenager did not intend to alarm anyone and the device, which the chief called “a homemade experiment,” was innocuous.

Now, three days after his arrest, they have finally announced he will not be charged.

But what has been damaged his Ahmed’s innocence.

Ahmed said he was a member of his middle school’s robotics club, and had tried to find a similar group in his high school — which he only started last week.

He wanted to find some peers, some similarly minded kids who he could hang out.

Now Ahmed says he’ll no longer bring any of his inventions into school.

He says the whole experience made him feel not like a human, but a criminal.

“I have lost my innocence. I can never look at the world in the same way,” he told The Independent.

“I like science, but I look like a threat because of my brown skin.”

Luckily for Ahmed not everyone thinks the way his school did. Not everyone views the world through a mist of prejudice. There is a slow and steady band of supporters coming together through social media banding behind Ahmed.

From the President of the United States:

To fellow science “geeks”:

To Hillary Clinton:

To Malala:

And Mark Zuckerberg:

Hopefully Ahmed will be able to continue his dream and stare down prejudice.

#IStandWithAhmed.