A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the city of Irving and its school district filed by the father of Ahmed Mohamed, the teenager whose homemade clock was mistaken for a bomb.
A family attorney said Friday that they would file a new lawsuit, The Associated Press reports.
Mohamed was arrested in September 2015 after bringing a digital clock that he built to MacArthur High School. Mohamed, who was 14 at the time, was suspended, but the school later dropped its charge against him for having a “hoax bomb.”
His family’s suit, which was filed in August 2016, alleged the Muslim student’s civil rights were violated.
“There was no alarm, they didn’t evacuate the school, they didn’t call in a bomb squad,” said Susan Hutchison, Mohamed's attorney. “They knew it wasn’t a bomb. They did none of those things.”
Watch Mohamed discuss the situation, courtesy of The Dallas Morning News
U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay on Thursday granted the city and school district's motions to dismiss the suit, The Dallas Morning News reports, saying there was no evidence the teenager faced religious or racial discrimination. Lindsay said the suit failed to prove Mohamed's arrest "violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure."
News of the arrest generated international headlines and even an invitation to the White House.
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.
— President Obama (@POTUS44) September 16, 2015
A month after the arrest, the Mohamed family announced they were moving to Qatar because of death threats. "We are going to move to a place where my kids can study and learn, and all of them being accepted by that country,” Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, told the Morning News in 2015.
Nearly a year later, The Washington Post checked in with Mohamed, who said he hopes to return to the U.S. for college.
In January, former Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne and conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who spoke out days after the arrest, were dismissed from a separate defamation suit filed on behalf of Mohamed, according to the Morning News.
