A “joke” about a bomb in the school backpack landed a 12-year-old Sikh boy of Dallas, Texas in juvenile detention for three days last week amid assertions by the family that the boy was the victim of a prank played by a bully classmate.
The authorities, however, maintained that the boy, Armaan Singh Sarai, was taken into custody on December 11 after a classmate reported that he had threatened to blow up Nichols Junior High School in Arlington.
Armaan, a seventh-grader, who has undergone three surgeries after being born with a heart condition, was handcuffed, taken to a juvenile detention facility and suspended from school even after the discovery that there was no explosive material of any kind in his backpack. He was released three days later.
The incident immediately brought to mind the travails of a Muslim boy, Ahmed Mohamed, in another Dallas suburb three months ago, when his homemade clock was mistaken by the school authorities for an explosive. He, too, was handcuffed and led away by the police at the time.
A dispute is raging between the police and the boy’s family on who was responsible for the prank, with Armaan himself telling the Dallas Morning News that he is innocent and just laughed with other students when one of them remarked that his backpack looked like a bomb. But the police said Armaan told them that he joked by telling a classmate he had a bomb in his backpack. “Just because you say it’s a joke, it doesn’t get you out of trouble,” a police spokesman commented, noting: “People have got to learn they cannot make these types of threats, which cause alarm, which cause evacuations.”
Armaan said it was another student who commented the previous day that his backpack, which had a battery charger in it, looked like a bomb. “I thought it was a joke, so I started laughing,” he said, adding: “The next thing you know, I’m reading with my friend and police come in, grab me and take me outside.”