In the final days of 2025, Christian Sturdivant, a teenager in North Carolina, struck up a conversation online with someone claiming to be a follower of the Islamic State terrorist organization. Sturdivant, federal investigators said, then revealed details of a possible attack. He shared a photo showing a knife and hammers. He asked for help getting guns. And he declared his devotion to the cause and his willingness to die for it.

“I am a soldier for the state,” he wrote.

But his confidant turned out to be an undercover law enforcement officer, and Sturdivant, 18, was arrested on New Year’s Eve, the FBI announced Friday.

Investigators said that he had planned to carry out an attack that day using knives and hammers at a grocery store and a fast-food restaurant in Mint Hill, North Carolina, the Charlotte suburb where he lived with his grandparents.

“He was preparing for jihad, and innocent people were going to die,” Russ Ferguson, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, told reporters Friday. “We were very, very fortunate they did not.”

Sturdivant has been charged with trying to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Arrested Wednesday

He was arrested Wednesday immediately after he was released from a medical facility, officials said. They did not disclose why he was at the facility.

Sturdivant, who made a brief initial court appearance Friday morning, has not yet entered a plea. Efforts to reach his family and his legal representation have been unsuccessful.

An attack would have come nearly a year after the New Year’s Day massacre in New Orleans that was carried out by a man who had also pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State group. In that attack, 14 people were killed after the man plowed a vehicle into a crowd on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and then opened fire. The perpetrator, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police.

The investigation into Sturdivant in North Carolina began after law enforcement officials said they were alerted to a series of public social media posts that were supportive of the Islamic State group. The account, they said, was traced to Sturdivant.

Investigators believe that Sturdivant had been radicalized online as a teenager and had first appeared on the radar of federal investigators in 2022, according to officials and court records.

At the time, investigators said, Sturdivant, then 14, had been in contact on social media with a purported Islamic State member in Europe, who had instructed him to dress in black clothing, knock on people’s doors and attack them with a hammer. Investigators said he had set off to do just that, but his grandfather restrained him and brought him home.

He was not charged and he was referred for psychological care instead, James C. Barnacle Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI in Charlotte, said in a news conference Friday. Sturdivant’s relatives also assured investigators then that he would no longer have access to social media.

This week, according to court records, his grandfather told investigators that he had made an effort to hide and lock away knives and other tools out of fear that Sturdivant could use them as weapons.

In a search of the family home, investigators found hammers and butcher knives hidden in Sturdivant’s bedroom, as well as tactical gear, including gloves and a protective vest, according to court records.

They also found handwritten notes buried in the trash that officials called his manifesto. He described his beliefs and outlined the details of how he planned to pull off an attack. “Will carry the knife in my pants and walk to the bathroom,” he wrote.

It was his belief, according to the note, that he would then go to heaven as a martyr.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Rick Rojas/Logan R. Cyrus
c. 2025 The New York Times Company