MONTREAL – A Canadian Muslim student is suing his Montreal high school after a joke misheard by the school monitor landed the young student in jail for months, framed as terrorist, before being freed from court.

“He is of Muslim origin; I’m a Muslim. He is black; his father is Haitian,” the mother of the student, who cannot be named because he was a minor at the time of his arrest, told CBC News on Tuesday, January 24.

“Unfortunately for him that’s three strikes. He’s Arab, he’s black and he’s Muslim.”

The teenager and his mother are suing Collège Charlemagne, a private school in Montreal’s West Island, alleging that his academic prospects were damaged after he was singled out and framed as an extremist.

The incident, which unfolded in the fall of 2015, occurred when the student failed a chemistry test.

Standing in one of the school’s open spaces on Oct. 13, 2015, he jokingly told his friends, “I want to jump from the agora” — “Je vais sauter de l’agora.”

A school monitor, Céline Primeau, who was nearby, thought he had said he would blow up the school (“Je vais faire sauter l’école”), the lawsuit says.

When she asked him whether he was serious, he replied sarcastically “yes,” the lawsuit said.

A few hours later at night, there was a knock on the door of the student’s home. He was in his bedroom. His mother answered, and went into a state of shock when she saw a dozen police officers outside.

“I wasn’t expecting anything. [My son] wasn’t expecting anything,” she told CBC News.

The officers went to her son’s bedroom and upon seeing his multiple award for athletics, said, “we don’t want you to run” and placed him in handcuffs, according to his mother.

“I dressed quickly and rushed after him.”

The student was acquitted several months later when the Crown failed to produce evidence against him.

Shock

The lawsuit was filed in Quebec Court in September. (Catherine Contant/Radio-Canada)

The student’s mother is puzzled why Collège Charlemagne never reached out to her, or her son, before going to police.

“I didn’t even deserve a phone call to find out what happened before the principal called the police,” the single mother said. She added that her son had been a student at the school for more than a decade.

After months in court, the case was dismissed last January after family hired defense lawyer Emilie Gagnon found police hadn’t bothered to cross-check any of the witness statements they had gathered.

Gagnon gathered five signed statements from the friends who were with the student in the cafeteria on Oct. 13.

They are included in the civil suit. All contradict the school monitor’s account of what the student said.

The statements from the friends include claims that the monitor in question had repeatedly said things they found racially insensitive.

“This person, in effect, seems to hold many prejudices against black people,” the lawsuit reads.

Wade Deisman, a criminology professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, said the case shows how fears of school shootings and terrorism have reshaped the way officials interpret students’ emotions.

“Feelings of frustration, anger or unhappiness are no longer normal adolescent expressions but are rather re-interpreted as threats … the scales have been tilted toward an assumption of threat rather than the presumption of innocence,” Dr. Deisman said.

The student is now in CEGEP and hasn’t yet given up his hopes of earning an athletic scholarship to a US university, his mother said.

“But he still has moments when he thinks about what happened,” she added.

“When there is a knock at the door at home, he jumps because he remembers the night he was arrested.”