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New Haven County resident Kevin McCormick of Hamden was sentenced on Thursday, Dec. 21 to 12 years in prison for trying to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut announced.
According to federal officials, between August and October 2019, McCormick told others several times that he wanted to travel to Syria and fight for ISIS. He also told members of a Muslim community center that "we should support ISIS” and “jihad is the way to go.”
Additionally, in another conversation that took place in October 2019, McCormick stated, "I gotta fight bro, because those people, Abu Masa and ISIL, they fought for me bro, I know it, I can feel it, in my heart. So it’s my time to fight...It just is what it is bro, it’s just my – it’s just my time to go bro.”
When the person he was talking to asked him to to expand on where he wanted to travel, McCormick said, "I don’t know, I don’t know bro – it’s gotta be like Syria. Where ISIL is at...whichever place is easiest, whatever place I can get there the fastest, the quickest, the easiest, and where I can have a rifle and I can have some people bro."
McCormick continued, "That’s what I need, I need a rifle and I need some people, I need Islamic law, I need, that’s what I need, because if I have these things, it’s gonna to be very hard to kill me," according to federal officials.
Days later, on Oct. 12, 2019, McCormick tried boarding a flight from Connecticut to Jamaica but was stopped by the US Department of Homeland Security. He later told an individual that he had wanted to travel to Jamaica and then to Syria to join ISIS, and had also indicated that he wanted to buy weapons, officials said.
On Oct. 19, 2019, McCormick then made matters worse when he produced a video in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. He also bought a plane ticket from Toronto, Canada, to Amman, Jordan.
McCormick was arrested on Oct. 21, 2019, after traveling to a small private airport in Connecticut where he had intended to board a flight to Canada. He has been detained since his arrest.
On Thursday, Jan. 12, McCormick pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Once his prison sentence is finished, he will serve a lifetime term of supervised release with monitoring of his electronic devices, officials announced.
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