FBI Says North Carolina Teen Planned New Year’s Eve ISIS-Inspired Knife Attack

Federal agents allege New Year’s Eve plot in Mint Hill

On the last Monday of 2025, federal agents walked into a small bedroom in Mint Hill, North Carolina, and say they found the outline of a New Year’s Eve massacre.

Under a bed, agents reported seizing two butcher knives and two hammers. Nearby were tactical gloves, a vest and handwritten notes, including one titled “New Years Attack 2026” that prosecutors say detailed a plan to stab as many people as possible at a local grocery store and fast-food restaurant, then attack responding officers in what the writer called a “martyrdom op.”

Authorities allege the author was Christian Sturdivant, an 18-year-old Burger King employee and Mint Hill resident, now charged with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The criminal complaint was filed Dec. 31 and unsealed Jan. 2 after his first appearance in federal court in Charlotte.

Prosecutors say the case is the latest sign that, even a decade after losing its territorial “caliphate,” the Islamic State’s propaganda continues to resonate with isolated Americans who can turn ordinary places into potential battlefields.

They also say it’s a case that nearly did not end in court. Federal agents first encountered Sturdivant as a teenager in 2022, diverted him to mental health treatment instead of prosecution, and more recently tried but failed to have him involuntarily committed before pursuing criminal charges.

A New Year’s Eve plot in suburbia

Mint Hill, a town of about 26,000 just east of Charlotte, is better known for subdivisions and strip malls than for national security cases. Prosecutors say that is precisely why Sturdivant chose it.

According to the complaint, in early December 2025 an online account linked to Sturdivant began posting messages praising the Islamic State, including an image of two figurines of Jesus with the caption, “May Allah curse the cross worshipers.” On Dec. 18, the FBI’s Charlotte field office received information about multiple pro-Islamic State posts and opened an investigation.

An undercover FBI employee posing online as an Islamic State supporter soon contacted the account. Two days later, on Dec. 14, Sturdivant allegedly sent the undercover operative a photograph of two hammers and a knife laid out on a surface. On Dec. 19, according to the complaint, he sent an audio recording swearing bayat, or allegiance, to the Islamic State and described himself as a “soldier of the state.”

“I will do jihad soon,” he wrote in one message, the filing states.

Investigators say that in subsequent communications, Sturdivant laid out plans to attack a grocery store and a fast-food restaurant in or near Mint Hill on Dec. 31 using knives and hammers. He allegedly said he hoped to kill 20 or 21 people, with notes referencing Jews, Christians and LGBTQ people as intended victims, and then attack responding law enforcement so he would be killed.

When agents searched his bedroom on Dec. 29 under a federal warrant, they reported finding weapons that matched the earlier photograph, along with tactical gear and written plans. One relative had been locking up household knives and hammers out of concern, investigators wrote, but Sturdivant had acquired and hidden additional tools on his own.

Sturdivant was arrested on Dec. 31. No attack took place, and authorities say the public was not in imminent danger because agents were monitoring his activities.

From mental health referral to terror charge

The federal terrorism case is not the first time Sturdivant has drawn law enforcement’s attention.

Officials say the FBI first became aware of him in 2022, when he was about 14, after learning he had been communicating online with a suspected Islamic State member in Europe and discussing an attack. According to law enforcement accounts, a relative — described in one report as his grandfather — intervened, and Sturdivant did not carry out any plans.

At that time, authorities did not charge him. Instead, they referred him for psychological or mental health treatment.

By late 2025, federal officials say, Sturdivant’s online behavior and private planning had escalated. A local news outlet reported that before seeking a material support warrant, FBI agents tried to have Sturdivant involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility but a state magistrate denied the petition, finding the legal standard for commitment was not met.

Federal officials have not publicly detailed that episode, but the case has already raised questions among legal and mental health experts about how the system handles youth who show signs of both mental illness and violent radicalization.

Federal response and legal stakes

Sturdivant is charged under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B with attempting to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization. The statute makes it a crime to knowingly provide, attempt to provide or conspire to provide “material support or resources” — including services or personnel — to groups the U.S. government has formally designated as terrorist organizations.

If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He is being held without bond pending further proceedings. Prosecutors with the Justice Department’s National Security Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina are handling the case.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement that the work by federal and local law enforcement “saved American lives from a horrific terrorist attack on New Year’s Eve” and that the Justice Department would ensure supporters of the Islamic State “face the full force of the law.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said Sturdivant “wanted to be a soldier for ISIS,” using another acronym for the Islamic State, and credited “joint work and rapid information-sharing” by the FBI, the New York Police Department and local agencies for disrupting the plot.

Assistant Attorney General John A. Eisenberg, who leads the department’s National Security Division, said Sturdivant was in “the final stages of planning a mass-casualty attack” and aspired to be a “martyr,” according to the government’s account.

North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein thanked the FBI and local officers in a public statement, saying that “thanks to the work of the FBI and vigilant law enforcement, this potential attack was stopped before anyone was hurt” and praising officers who worked through the holidays.

ISIS influence and FBI tactics

Federal officials say the Mint Hill case fits a pattern of Islamic State-inspired plots that rely on simple, everyday weapons and target crowded civilian spaces. In a public statement, the Justice Department noted that Sturdivant’s focus on knives mirrored a 2016 article in an Islamic State propaganda magazine that encouraged followers to carry out knife attacks in Western countries, an article that has been cited in several later cases.

The alleged New Year’s Eve plot also came one year after a man drove a truck bearing an Islamic State flag into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on Jan. 1, 2025, killing 15 people and wounding dozens more. After that attack, federal agencies warned of possible copycat or retaliatory attacks targeting holiday gatherings.

The Mint Hill case relies heavily on an undercover online operative, a tactic that has been central to many FBI terrorism investigations in the last two decades and has drawn scrutiny from civil liberties advocates. Defense lawyers in other cases have accused the government of enticing vulnerable individuals into plots they would not have carried out on their own.

Prosecutors typically counter that they target people who have already shown a willingness to act on violent extremist beliefs and that undercover operations are often the only way to understand a suspect’s intent and capacity.

In Sturdivant’s case, prosecutors are likely to point to his history of interest in the Islamic State, prior contact with suspected extremists, independent acquisition of weapons and handwritten attack plan as evidence of predisposition. The Justice Department has emphasized that an entrapment claim would be litigated in court if the case proceeds to trial and that Sturdivant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Averted violence, lingering questions

For Mint Hill’s residents, the alleged plot turned their neighborhood grocery store and fast-food outlet into symbols of a threat more often associated with major cities and overseas battlefields.

Officials have touted the disruption as a success story for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force model, which pulls together federal, state and local agencies, as well as specialized units such as the NYPD’s cyber investigators. Yet the case also underscores the difficulty of intervening early with radicalized youth and the limits of short-term mental health care to stop a determined attacker.

As the legal case against Sturdivant moves forward in federal court, the events leading up to his arrest will likely remain at the center of a broader debate: how to prevent a teenager from turning an ordinary New Year’s Eve in suburban North Carolina into a scene of mass violence, and what it means when the success story is an attack that never happened.