A 21-year-old Idaho man has been sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group, after prosecutors said he planned to attack churches in Coeur d’Alene using explosives, knives and firearms.
Alexander Scott Mercurio pleaded guilty to the federal terrorism charge last month. US District Judge David C. Nye handed down the sentence Tuesday and ordered that Mercurio be placed on lifetime supervised release once his prison term ends.
According to prosecutors, Mercurio had pledged allegiance to IS and planned to use explosives, knives, firearms and other weapons against churches in the Idaho city on behalf of the terror group. The FBI arrested him on April 6, 2024, one day before the planned attack, prosecutors said.
Idaho US Attorney John Shirts said the sentence “sends the clear message that where individuals intend to pursue acts of terrorism against the United States — whether in Coeur d’Alene, or any other community — they will be brought to justice.”
Court records show Mercurio had built an online repository of pro-IS content and initially hoped to travel overseas to join the organization but lacked the money to do so. Shortly before his arrest, he gave a government informant an audio recording pledging support for IS along with a photo of himself holding a knife in front of an IS flag.
Mercurio’s defense attorneys, Carter Powers Beggs and J. Stephen Roberts Jr. of the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho, declined to comment on the sentence itself. But in court filings, they painted a picture of a troubled teenager raised in a dysfunctional household who was exposed to white supremacist ideology at a young age before later embracing radical Islam.
His attorneys said Mercurio was dealing with family trauma and had become isolated from the outside world when he was befriended online by a government informant. By that point, they wrote, he had already cycled through multiple political ideologies, ultimately turning to radical Islam when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.
“Starting when he was just 17 years old, Mr. Mercurio spent his days holed away in his basement bedroom, talking with his best friend about increasingly radical terrorist ideologies,” his attorneys wrote. “Together they brainstormed a plan that was as horrific as it was unlikely to succeed: a suicidal attack on local churches using his father’s firearms and an untested improvised explosive/flamethrower.”
Mercurio’s attorneys said he has since renounced his extremist views and has been assessed as a low risk of future danger. They had asked the court to impose a nine-year sentence instead.
The Islamic State group, designated a terrorist organization by the US government, seized large portions of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and declared the territory a caliphate. Though largely defeated in both countries by 2018, the group still maintains sleeper cells responsible for deadly attacks, and IS affiliates continue to operate in West Africa.
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