Federal authorities said Friday they disrupted a plan by an 18-year-old, inspired by the Islamic State, to attack a grocery store and fast-food restaurants in North Carolina.
Christian Sturdivant was charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terror organization after FBI agents alleged he discussed his intentions for a New Year’s Eve attack with at least two undercover law enforcement officials posing as Islamic extremists.
He was arrested Wednesday in Mint Hill, North Carolina, a suburb of Charlotte, and was ordered held without bail by a federal magistrate judge Friday morning. A defense attorney listed in public court filings did not immediately return calls for comment.
“This is still very much an active investigation,” Russ Ferguson, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, said at a news conference Friday announcing Sturdivant’s arrest. “We had to act very quickly to protect the public.”
Though Ferguson cautioned that authorities did not believe there was any lingering threat to public safety, he said many details about Sturdivant’s plans remained unknown.
In recent weeks, the FBI has arrested a number of other individuals alleged to have been plotting terrorist attacks planned on or around this week’s New Year’s Eve festivities. Many of those investigations, including the one that led to the charges against Sturdivant, involved undercover agents or officers offering encouragement and in some cases suggestions on carrying out those attacks.
Critics say those tactics run the risk of targeting vulnerable people for prosecution who may not have had the means or the immediate desire to carry out an attack on their own. The bureau has defended its methods, saying the tactic is one of the few that can help investigators prevent threats of terrorist violence before they result in deaths.
Sturdivant’s arrest came three weeks after he began communicating online with a person he believed to be a member of the Islamic State and repeatedly expressed his support for the extremist organization, according to an arrest affidavit in the case. Authorities said that individual was actually an undercover New York Police Department employee.
The officer encouraged Sturdivant to prove his commitment through an act of violence, the document states. Sturdivant later repeated his intentions to attack a grocery store in Mint Hill, near the Burger King restaurant where he worked, in separate conversations with an undercover FBI agent also posing as an Islamic State sympathizer, officials said.
Ferguson said authorities had sought a court order earlier this week to have Sturdivant involuntarily committed for psychiatric care — a request that was denied by a state judge. At that point, agents were forced to file criminal charges against him and obtain a warrant for his arrest, Ferguson said.
“From his notes, he was targeting Jews, Christians and LGBTQ individuals,” Ferguson said. “He was preparing for jihad, and innocent people were going to die.”
During a raid on Sturdivant’s family home Monday, authorities found two butcher knives and a hammer hidden under his bed — weapons officials said he intended to use to kill as many as 11 people.
They also discovered writings in a trash can in which they say Sturdivant laid out detailed plans for his assault, including the text message he intended to send his family during the attack and his plan to take his own life afterward by attacking responding police.
In one of the handwritten messages, titled “The Way of the Lion (The Martyr’s Notes),” Sturdivant said his goal was “pure destruction of America and the West,” according to the arrest affidavit.
The affidavit described another incident in 2022 several years earlier when Sturdivant received instructions from an Islamic State member in Europe to knock on the doors of Mint Hill residents and attack them with hammers. Sturdivant had connected with that man online and at one point left his house armed with a hammer with plans to attack his neighbor, the affidavit states.
Sturdivant’s grandfather, who court filings described as a Christian minister and grocery store employee, restrained him at the time, thwarting that attack. The grandfather had taken steps since then to try to keep household objects that could be used as weapons out of his grandson’s reach, according to the affidavit.
The FBI’s investigation into that incident was closed at the time that authorities began tracking Sturdivant’s new plans last month, and he was not on the bureau’s radar, officials said.
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