12-Year-Old Autistic Boy Arrested For Playing With Imaginary Rifle In Class

Brittany M. Hughes | May 11, 2018
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A 12-year-old autistic boy was put in handcuffs Monday and hauled off to a juvenile detention center for playing with an imaginary rifle in his 5th grade classroom.

From FOX26 out of Conroe, Texas:

The offense alleged against 12-year-old David Sims is brandishing an "imaginary" rifle at his art teacher, an educator who apparently felt threatened.

"She (CISD Police Officer) just put handcuffs on me and told me I need to go with her," said David Sims.

"They just said, 'We don't tolerate that. We take it as a threat.' A threat? He didn't threaten anyone. He didn't do anything but play," said Amy Sims, David's mother.

David spent over two hours at a local juvenile detention center before being released. His mother, Amy, said she didn’t find out about the incident until after her son was arrested, saying that her son didn’t understand why he’d been yanked out of class in handcuffs.

"Being put in handcuffs, not knowing what he did wrong, I could have had a talk with him and told him look, I know you like to play guns, but you can't do it in school," said Sims.

The school is refusing to comment for privacy reasons, but Montgomery County Attorney J.D. Lambright reportedly told FOX that the boy had made some kind of verbal threat (but didn’t give details) and had pretended to fire an imaginary gun before. David’s mom, on the other hand, said her son is being picked on because of his autism.

"Because he's disabled, they automatically think he's got something mental, so he might go shoot up a school," she claimed.

David’s family says the school has placed the boy in “an alternative disciplinary school for the remainder of the Spring semester,” the report adds.

 

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