Texas: A 12 year old Sikh boy was held behind bars for three days after he allegedly joked with his classmate about blowing up the building with a bomb stowed in his backpack. In a Facebook post written by Armaan Singh Sarai's cousin, she said, “a bully in class thought it would be funny to accuse him of having a bomb, so the principal, without any questioning, interrogation, or notification to his parents, called the police.”
“Worried and frightened at home, his family was concerned as to why he had not reached home right after school. They started calling every police department in the area, only to find that he was sent to a juvenile facility. They kept him held behind bars for three consecutive days,” Sarai’s cousin Ginee Haer wrote in the post, shared by around 8,000 people on Facebook.
An officer, however, said the boy was sent to the juvenile centre after admitting he had joked about the threat. “We received a call on December 11 about a student who threatened to blow up the school with a bomb. When we arrived, we had to evacuate the classroom consisting of 16 students and a teacher and spoke to the student who alerted the teacher… The student who made the threat admitted to saying he had a bomb and that he would blow up the school but that he was joking,” said lieutenant Christopher Cook. He said the police checked the boy’s backpack and made sure he did not pose any security threat, but still arrested him, as making a “terroristic threat” is a felony. When asked why Sarai was held for three days despite investigations being “completed within 45 minutes”, Cook said, “We arrested the boy and handed him over to the juvenile facility. How long they hold him for is not under our control; it’s determined by the juvenile justice department.”
Meanwhile, in a letter to the school principal Julie Harcrow, Sarai’s older brother Aksh Singh said other students, too, were joking about bombs but only the “Indian boy was taken into police custody”.
