FBI says undercover operation thwarted ISIS-inspired terror attack

Federal authorities said Friday they disrupted a plan by an 18-year-old, inspired by the Islamic State, to attack patrons at a grocery store and fast-food restaurants outside Charlotte.

Christian Sturdivant had drawn up detailed plans for what he described as a New Year’s Eve “martyrdom op” to target patrons with hammers and knives, officials said. He was charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terror organization after he discussed his intentions last month with two undercover law enforcement officers posing as Islamic extremists.

“It was a very well-planned, thoughtful attack,” Russ Ferguson, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, said at a news conference announcing the arrest. “He was preparing for jihad, and innocent people were going to die.”

Ferguson stressed that FBI agents had Sturdivant, a Burger King employee and grandson of a Christian minister, under surveillance for days leading up to his arrest Wednesday. At no point during that period did authorities believe he posed an immediate danger to public safety, Ferguson said.

Authorities also believed Sturdivant suffered from sufficiently serious psychiatric problems that they sought earlier in the week to have him involuntarily committed for care, Ferguson said. A North Carolina state judge’s denial of that request prompted the decision to charge him with a crime and arrest him instead, Ferguson said.

Sturdivant remains in federal custody late Friday pending a bail hearing next week. A defense attorney listed in public court filings did not immediately return calls for comment.

In recent weeks, the FBI has arrested a number of other individuals alleged to have been plotting terrorist attacks in Texas, California, and Louisiana. Many of those investigations, like 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 thought 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.

In Sturdivant’s case, authorities said he began communicating online three weeks ago with a person he believed to be a member of the Islamic State and repeatedly expressed his support for the extremist organization. That individual was actually an undercover New York Police Department employee.

“I will do jihad soon,” Sturdivant told him during a Dec. 13 exchange, according to an arrest affidavit filed in his case.

The officer encouraged Sturdivant to prove his commitment through an act of violence, the document states. The teen 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.

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.

Ferguson said Friday that while investigators believe Sturdivant had been planning his intended New Year’s Eve strike for a year, he was planning to undertake some form of attack “for far longer than that”

The arrest affidavit described another incident in 2022 when Sturdivant, dressed in black, had attempted to attack his neighbor with hammers, acting upon instructions he’d received online from an Islamic State member in Europe.

Sturdivant’s grandfather restrained him at the time, thwarting that attack. James C. Barnacle Jr., special agent in charge of the FBI’s Charlotte field office, said Friday that Sturdivant had received psychiatric care after that incident and that his grandfather had taken steps since then to keep household objects that could be used as weapons out of his grandson’s reach.

Barnacle said that before last month Sturdivant was not on the FBI’s radar, as the investigation into that previous incident had been closed years ago.