Idaho Man Gets 18 Years for ISIS Plot to Attack Churches

Alexander Scott Mercurio, 21, of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, was sentenced on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, to 18 years in federal prison for attempting to provide material support to ISIS in a plot to attack churches. US District Judge David C. Nye also ordered lifetime supervised release. Mercurio had pledged allegiance to ISIS and planned a mass-casualty attack on churches in his hometown, and the FBI arrested him on 6 April 2024, one day before the attack was due to happen.

The plan, as set out by prosecutors, was chilling in its detail. Mercurio intended to incapacitate his own father with a metal pipe, steal his firearms, and then attack churches with guns, knives, explosives and an improvised flamethrower.

The attack was set for 7 April 2024, before the end of Ramadan. He was 19 years old at the time of his arrest.

Judge Nye rejected his lawyers' plea for a lighter term. The 18-year sentence, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, means Mercurio will spend his twenties and much of his thirties behind bars, and will remain under federal supervision for the rest of his life. He had pleaded guilty in October 2025.

Idaho Man Sentenced 18 Years ISIS Church Attack Plot

The sentencing hearing in federal court closed a case that began with an FBI investigation in the spring of 2024. Prosecutors said Mercurio had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and was preparing a mass-casualty attack on churches in Coeur d'Alene, a lakeside city in northern Idaho. The charge was attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organisation, a federal offence that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

The Associated Press reported the sentence on 10 November, and the US Department of Justice published its own account of the case the same day. Both accounts agree on the core facts: the pledge to ISIS, the planned attack on churches, the arrest one day before it was due to happen, and the guilty plea last month.

What made the case stand out, even among terrorism prosecutions, was the target. Churches are not hardened buildings.

Their doors are open on Sundays, their pews are full of families, and their congregations include children and elderly people who cannot run. A man who planned to walk into one with a flamethrower was not planning a symbolic attack. He was planning a massacre in a place built for prayer.

FBI Arrested Mercurio One Day Before Planned Attack

The timeline is the part that still makes people in Coeur d'Alene pause. Mercurio planned the attack for Sunday, 7 April 2024.

The FBI arrested him on Saturday, 6 April, the day before. One more day, and the plan would have moved from preparation to action.

Investigators had been watching him as the plan took shape. The details prosecutors laid out, the metal pipe for his father, the stolen firearms, the knives and explosives and the improvised flamethrower, show a plot that had moved well past talk.

This was not a young man venting online. This was a young man gathering the tools for a killing.

The arrest spared the churches of Coeur d'Alene a Sunday that would have been remembered for generations. It also spared Mercurio's own father, who was to be the first victim, incapacitated with a pipe so his son could take his guns. The family at the centre of the plot has had to live with that detail for more than two years now, through the guilty plea and the wait for sentence.

Churches in America Face a Growing Threat

The Mercurio case lands in a wider picture of pressure on churches that reaches far beyond Idaho. Christians in other parts of the world face the same danger at a far greater scale. In Nigeria, gunmen killed five Christians in two villages in Plateau State in a single night this month, as Latest: 5 Christians Killed in Nigeria Plateau Attacks as Gunmen Strike Two Villages reported, and two Christians were killed and 18 seized in a raid in Kaduna, as Two Christians Killed, 18 Seized in Kaduna Raid Today reported.

In India, Christians in West Bengal were denied burial and attacked, as West Bengal Christians Denied Burial and Attacked reported. The weapons and the settings change from country to country, but the pattern is the same: people gathered to worship are treated as soft targets, and the churches they gather in are treated as places to strike.

The difference in Coeur d'Alene is that the attack never happened. The FBI got there first. That is the part of the story that gives it a different ending from the ones in Plateau or Kaduna or West Bengal, where the gunmen arrived and the congregations counted their dead.

What the Sentence Means for Coeur d'Alene Churches

What the sources confirm is the sentence, the judge, the charge and the plea. What has not been made public is any detailed account of how the FBI first came to watch Mercurio, or how close his preparations were to being complete when agents moved in on 6 April 2024. Those details may emerge in later reporting, or they may stay in the case file.

For the churches of Coeur d'Alene, the sentence closes a chapter that began with a knock on a door in April 2024. They worshipped on Sunday, 7 April, not knowing that a man had planned to turn their sanctuaries into a killing ground, and that he had been stopped the day before. They know now, and the sentence handed down this week tells them how seriously the federal courts took the threat.

Eighteen years is a long time, and a lifetime of supervised release is longer still. The question that lingers is not about the sentence, but about the young man who earned it: how a 19-year-old in a quiet Idaho town came to pledge himself to ISIS and plan a massacre in his neighbours' churches, and how many others like him are out there, still unnoticed, still counting down to a Sunday of their own.