A former teacher of Ahmed “clock boy” Mohamed is speaking out on the student’s past – and it isn’t pretty.
Ralph Kubiak, 62, taught Mohamed’s history class in seventh grade at Sam Houston Middle School in Garland, Texas. He told the Dallas Morning News on Saturday the “weird little kid” once built a remote control to mess with a teacher’s classroom projector.
The paper reported Mohamed as having “racked up weeks of suspensions” over the course of two years.
Kubiak told the paper Mohamed, the kind of kid who “could either be CEO of a company or head of a gang,” once bragged about reciting his First Amendment rights in the principal’s office.
The retired teacher also said he talked to the the 14-year-old shortly after his suspension for building a “suitcase-clock” at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, on Sept. 14.
“I told you one day I’m going to be — and you told me yourself — I’m going to be really big on the Internet one day,” Ahmed told Kubiak over the phone, the Dallas Morning News reported.
The testimony by Mohamed’s former teacher adds to a list of peculiar developments to the story since it first broke – and then went viral – when President Obama invited the boy to the White House Sept. 16.
Electronics expert Thomas Talbot also posted a video Sept. 18 detailing the hoax-like nature of Mohamed’s “invention,” given that he only took the components of an existing digital clock and placed them inside a suitcase.
NBA owner Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks told HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher Sept. 18 that he spoke to Mohamed on the phone, but his sister supplied answers any time the conversation turned toward how, exactly, events transpired on the day of his suspension.
The Daily Beast reported a day earlier that Mohamed’s 17-year-old sister, Eyman, admitted to being suspended for a “bomb”-related incident in middle school.
“I got suspended from school for three days from this stupid same district, from this girl saying I wanted to blow up the school, something I had nothing to do with,” the girl told the Daily Beast.
Irving, Texas, Mayor Beth Van Duyne said on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze TV Sept. 22 Mohamed’s family refuses to allow the school district to release records that would exonerate police and school officials.
“Nobody is going to walk in and say, ‘Oh you’re a 14-year old child, you’re totally cooperating, we have all the answers we need, let’s arrest you,'” Van Duyne told the Blaze TV.
Mohamed and his family plan on meeting with dignitaries at the United Nations before traveling to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. A trip to California, a tour of Google headquarters, and an appearance on “Dr. Oz” are also in the works, the Dallas Morning News reported.
