The FBI has said it thwarted an alleged plot to carry out a New Year’s Eve terrorist attack on a grocery store and restaurant in North Carolina in support of the Islamic State (IS).
Christian Sturdivant, 18, of Mint Hill – a town outside Charlotte – was arrested on 31 December as he was being released from a special medical facility. He was charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, the US attorney for the western district of North Carolina, Russ Ferguson, said at a press conference on Friday morning.
Investigators believe that Sturdivant, a US citizen, had been planning the attack for about a year, after a search of his home on 29 December uncovered knives and hammers under his bed, as well as detailed notes on the planned massacre. Ferguson said the suspect’s notes revealed that he wanted to target Jews, Christians and LGBTQ+ individuals, and planned to die a “martyr” by attacking police officers that arrived at the scene.
Sturdivant’s radicalization took place online on IS websites, authorities said, and he was found to be the holder of a TikTok account that made multiple posts in support of the designated terrorist organization. He then reached out to pledge allegiance on an IS site, unwittingly doing so to an undercover New York police department agent.
With that agent, whom Sturdivant believed to be an ISIS affiliate, he communicated on a range of social media platforms and disclosed his intention to carry out the New Year’s Eve attack. Over the course of December, he sent a picture of two hammers and a knife, a voice note pledging allegiance and a message requesting help obtaining guns to use in the attack, FBI special agent James Barnacle said. He also indicated the grocery store he wanted to target – authorities did not disclose the name of the establishment at this time.
Barnacle, who is in charge of the bureau’s Charlotte field office, told the news conference that Sturdivant had been known to the FBI since 2022, when at 14 years old he was found to be in contact via social media with an unidentified IS member overseas. That person had told him to dress in black, and to knock on people’s doors and attack them with a hammer, Barnacle said, but Sturdivant’s family stepped in.
There were no charges brought at that time, Barnacle said, and Sturdivant was referred for psychological care and was off social media. The FBI then closed that investigation.
Sturdivant had his initial court appearance on Friday morning and remains in federal custody. If convicted, he faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, prosecutors said.
