‘Clock Boy’ Ahmed Mohamed can’t escape that moment

The news crew is here, but the famous boy is still asleep. He had just flown 22 hours, back to this squat stone house where he used to live when he was just a regular 14-year-old. His bright green go-kart is still out back.

A year ago, he could have woken up and spent hours tinkering with its engine. He could have spent the day on his trampoline, or just watching funny YouTube videos on his phone.

Instead, he’s waking up to the sound of more reporters in the living room. Because he’s not Ahmed Mohamed, a regular 14-year-old. He’s Clock Boy, a viral sensation, the accidental embodiment of a national debate about Muslims being dangerous — or not. A black youth mistreated by overzealous cops — or an example of vigilance against potential terrorism.

So Ahmed gets out of bed, opens the bedroom door and steps into the hall. He lifts his arm in a half wave.

“There he is!” The cameraman shouts, like he’s seeing an old friend. Ahmed got taller, they all point out. New glasses and a growth spurt have subtly transformed him from boyish to teenage.

“He is still sleepy,” his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, apologizes.

The reporters are from Fox 4, a local TV channel. Mohamed invited them here, on Ahmed’s first day back in Texas after nine months in Qatar. They moved a month after Ahmed was arrested for possessing a homemade clock that his school deemed suspicious-looking. The move, it seemed, was an attempt to escape the spotlight, or at least the hate mail and death threats that came with it.

And yet, Ahmed’s summer homecoming was heralded to reporters with a news release sent out by the family and its supporters: Clock Boy is back, and ready to be interviewed.

“You just wake up?” Ahmed’s uncle, Aldean, says. “Go prepare yourself.”

Ahmed changes into a T-shirt with the number 23 — for LeBron James — across the chest. They hand him a microphone.

“All right, Ahmed, it’s just you and me talking, the rest of the world listening,” the reporter says. “So don’t be nervous.”

The living room is packed: cousins, aunts, grandmother. Ahmed’s Uncle Aldean, who in the early 1980s was the first Mohamed to move from Sudan — where their family owned a successful cotton farm and attended prestigious schools — to New York, where he sold balloons and hot dogs in front of Rockefeller Center. Ahmed’s father, an imam, who followed his brother to America and ever since has been explaining to anyone who will listen that real Muslims are peaceful.

Their family friend Anthony Bond, the founder of the Irving NAACP, who has been calling the Mohameds in Qatar to tell them how, since they left, things are getting worse. Clashes between black communities and the police are in the news every day. Donald Trump, the man who wants to ban Muslim immigrants like the Mohameds from the United States, may become president.

Bond was the first person the family called when they brought Ahmed home from the police station. They wondered: Would this have happened if his name wasn’t Ahmed Mohamed?

Bond said: Let’s call the media.

He said: This city has transformed from whitewashed to incredibly diverse, and we’re still being mistreated.

He said: With all the discrimination going on in the world, this little boy can make a positive difference.

Ahmed walks in the house later that evening to find his uncle, dad and Bond in front of the TV, searching for his name again.

“We want to watch you on the Dallas Morning News,” his dad says. Ahmed had a “Facebook Live” interview with the newspaper after talking to Fox 4, and they’re trying to find it on YouTube.

“It’s on Facebook,” Ahmed says, raising his voice over the clang of dishes being washed by his aunts in the kitchen. His mom and four of his siblings haven’t yet come from Qatar, so Ahmed, his brother and his father are staying with the cousins who now live in their old house. They push the remote into Ahmed’s hand.

Searching for his name is a daily ritual. The family is its own public relations firm, founded Sept. 14, 2015, as they brought Ahmed home from the police station.

His parents had a choice: deal with this quietly, or tell someone. Their son had been placed in handcuffs and interrogated, in a town known for its resentment of Muslims. So they called the media, and soon Ahmed was trending on Twitter, and everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to President Barack Obama was sharing messages of support.

Two days after he was arrested, the charges were dropped.

“This is what happens when we (IPD) screw something up,” one Irving Police Department detective wrote in an email later uncovered as part of a public records request from Vice. “That thing didn’t even look like a bomb.”

And so came the next choice: Let this all die down, or seize the platform they’d been given and use it.

So they put Ahmed on “Good Morning America,” MSNBC and “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.” He told reporters how kids in school called him ISIS Boy. Sympathetic crowdfunders raised $18,000 for his education. He visited the White House, the Google Science Fair and the president of his home country of Sudan (a wanted war criminal, but Mohamed said it would be rude not to accept the invitation).

Does Ahmed want to do all these interviews?

“For the most part, yes, and sometimes no. If I wouldn’t get tired, I would do more interviews so I would have more influence.”

His dad tells him that this is God opening doors for him. Something bad happened, but God turned it to make it good. God chose him for this, so he can make the world a better place.

Only now, he feels safer on the other side of the world. As trolls tried to pick apart his story, someone posted the Mohameds’ home address on Twitter.

The Internet is his refuge — and his attacker. He reads every story and long, rambling conspiracy theories about him. Countless blogs and videos have been dedicated to proving Ahmed’s clock was just a Radio Shack clock he put in a new box. (It was partially made of Radio Shack parts, but the design was all his own, he says.) Others insist that this was all a stunt masterminded by Mohamed to get attention. (“He can’t plan the reaction. And why would he want me to get arrested?” Ahmed says.)

Ahmed would like to respond, but he never does because then he will have allowed himself to be angry. In Islam, Ahmed says, you are most vulnerable to the devil when you are angry.

Instead he tweets only positive messages to his 97,000 followers. Like when he announced “Just Arrived in Dallas!” with a heart emoji and “It feels good to be back!”

“plz go back to Qatar. You’re not welcome here.”

“Go back with your terrorist dad”

“They think that all Muslims are terrorist people who kill for their religion,” Ahmed says.

Some days, Ahmed lets himself imagine what life would be like if none of this had happened. Amy Schumer wouldn’t follow him on Twitter. He wouldn’t know what it feels like to shake Obama’s hand. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology wouldn’t have accepted him to college.

But he wouldn’t be scared when he sees police cars. Maybe he would have made new friends in high school. By now he could have invented something new — not just a clock that only took him a few minutes to put together from parts in his family’s garage.

His middle school tutors say shy Ahmed would always perk up when talking about his latest creation: a DVD player, a remote, things that lit and beeped and buzzed. Ahmed would charge his older sisters’ friends $10 to fix their cracked phone screens, then use the money to buy the parts he was missing for his next gadget.

The neighborhood surrounding the Islamic Center of Irving, which serves around 10,000 area Muslims, began to flourish with condos and mansions built by those who wanted to live close to the mosque. Rumors spread that the neighborhood was a “no-go zone,” an area only Muslims could enter, and that the mosque was imposing Sharia law in the city. The rumors were false.

Meanwhile, Ahmed was preparing to start high school. He planned out his outfits, one for each day of the week.

On Friday of his third week of school, a teacher was about to throw away some dead batteries. Ahmed, always the hoarder of scrap materials, asked whether he could have them. Later in his English class, he taped the batteries together to make a sword. He slid the creation up his long-sleeved shirt, walked up to his teacher’s desk and slid the sword out of his arm, “like Iron Man,” he says. She laughed.

“That’s not the only thing I can make,” he told her. He promised to bring her something else on Monday.

Sunday night, he made his clock. It had a motherboard, an LCD screen, a 9-volt battery, an alarm. All the pieces fit into a pencil case from Target adorned with a tiger hologram.

In English class, he took it up to the teacher’s desk, eager to show his creation as he had promised.

“That looks like a bomb,” she said.

Here is what Ahmed’s school now has to say about what happened: “At no point did we think it was actually an explosive device. It looked suspicious and was presented in a way that the teacher took the appropriate actions, and we support the teacher.”

Although the Irving police dropped the charges against Ahmed, stating that “the student apparently did not intend to cause alarm bringing the device to school,” Ahmed was suspended for three days.

The Justice Department is now investigating the incident. Rather than release the letter of inquiry from the agency, which states the reason for the investigation to the public, the district is suing the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

“Irving ISD has argued that the information is confidential because it reasonably anticipates litigation regarding this matter,” the district’s spokeswoman said.

Ahmed’s father is expected to file suit against the school district soon. In November, the family asked for formal apologies — from the district, the police chief and the mayor — and $15 million in damages for alleged violations of federal and state law, arguing that the teenager’s arrest violated his civil rights.

Citing a potential lawsuit, city officials declined to comment on Ahmed’s arrest.

This story was originally published August 5, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "‘Clock Boy’ Ahmed Mohamed can’t escape that moment."