It’s been nearly a week since an autistic youth from Castle Rock was arrested by the FBI at Denver International Airport before he could board a flight to the Middle East and join up with the terrorist group ISIS.
And curiously, the local media has been completely incurious to find out any information on their own about this depressed teen with an extensive mental health rap sheet, who was only targeted by the FBI for investigation after he turned 18.
But we have questions.
Reports say Davin Daniel Meyer was 17 when he was first reported to police as becoming radicalized and making comments that he wanted to die for Allah.
It was his bucket list before he turned 30.
Reports also say he spent eight months in a residential treatment program between 2021 and 2022 and received diagnoses of “autism spectrum disorder; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood; specific learning disorder with impairment in mathematics; and major depressive disorder, recurrent episode, moderate.”
He refused to take medication for all of this — whatever medication one is supposed to take for being autistic and sucking at math. And reportedly made racist comments about women, people of color, and Jews — Jews being the historical target of the radical Islamist community.
We are ever so curious as to how this 17-year-old with an extensive list of mental issues was so capable of plotting and carrying out this mission that led to his arrest by the FBI?
From CBS Colorado:
Over the course of several months, Meyer obtained a passport and allegedly began preparing to travel to Turkey to meet other ISIS members and join their fight, according to the FBI. He’s since been charged with attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
The FBI says Meyer wanted to join ISIS’s fight in Syria and Iraq or, failing that, carry out an attack or attacks in the U.S., going as far as allegedly saying he’d be willing to kill himself.
We’d like to know more about this suspect’s life before the FBI got involved, especially in light of reports that federal agents during the Obama administration “identified vulnerable young men and individuals with mental or intellectual disabilities, and exploited their vulnerabilities. In some of those cases, informants met young men in online chat rooms and engaged them in discussions, sometimes urging them down the perceived path toward radicalization.”
And how odd that the suspect is masked in the only photos made public by the feds?
The media needs to start asking questions.