If administrators seriously thought it was that dangerous the school should have been evacuated and the bomb squad should have been called to investigate immediately. Questioning it and arresting the student is not going to save lives, if that was their intention.
I’ve “discussed” this with secular humanists, when they aren’t doing everything they can to smear me as an “evil person.”
According to what we know, what the school and police did are justifiable.
As the police said, there was a concern this could be the infrastructure of a bomb.
They also brought up that it could cause concern if left somewhere. Are teens beyond doing something like that to get attention, thinking it’s all right because it’s not real?
The behavior of the teen has also been described as not cooperative, and it’s also apparent that even lied about a lot and his story as presented in the media hasn’t been consistent.
He said himself, too, that he used a cord to shut the “clock” so it wouldn’t look “like a threat” and “that much suspicious.”
He also plugged in the clock during English (not engineering) and said during an interview that he was showing a friend when the clock beeped and his teacher noticed it. It would be interesting to know what was going on in the class at that time. Was it free time for him to talk to friends and show them something? The fact that Mohamed might have been not working on whatever he was supposed to, or paying attention to the teacher, might have factored in to the impression that something was possibly going on.
Apparently, too, there was some sense that his family were outspoken Muslim activists, which would explain the remark made by an officer when he met Mohamed that “he thought that’s who it was.”
I don’t fault a teacher, at this point in how much we know, for being concerned and feeling obligated to report it. Current rules in schools say to do so. People have also faulted the teacher for being “dumb,” since there were no explosives, but again, it could be the start of a bomb, and today so much information is available to anyone over the internet, that you hear of things having uses, and even potentially damaging ones, that you never heard of. Pressure cooker bombs, for instance. This could have even been a chemical or biological weapon, set to a timer, for all the teacher knew (especially if there was a suspicion that his family could possibly be Islamic extremists).