By Tiffany Williams –
Kevin Iman McCormick, 29, of Hamden, Connecticut, pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Between August and October 2019, McCormick made several statements to others, expressing a desire to travel to Syria and to fight for ISIS.
In one conversation 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 McCormick was asked to elaborate on where he would like to travel, McCormick responded, “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. 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.”
On Oct. 12, 2019, McCormick attempted to board a flight from Connecticut to Jamaica but was prevented by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. McCormick subsequently told an individual that he wanted to travel to Jamaica and then onward to Syria to join ISIS. On Oct. 19, 2019, McCormick made a video during which he pledged allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Also, on that date, he purchased a plane ticket from Toronto, Canada, to Amman, Jordan.
McCormick was arrested on October 21, 2019, after he traveled to a small private airport in Connecticut, where he expected to board a plane that would fly him to Canada
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