Sentence in long-running Chicago terrorism case to be handed down Monday
In one of the last moments of freedom Adel Daoud has known, the Hillside man said a prayer as he traveled to Chicago in 2012 to push the detonator on a 1,000-pound car bomb in the Loop that could have killed hundreds of people.
The 18-year-old Daoud sat in the passenger seat of a car beside an undercover FBI agent, and he prayed on Sept. 14, 2012, to “make this our first operation, but not our last one.” Later that day, he would be arrested after pushing the button on the bomb.
More than six years later, Daoud stood in a federal courtroom Wednesday wearing an orange jumpsuit and facing a judge. He said he looks back and “sometimes I laugh at my stupidity.” He said, “I don’t want to kill people or join a terrorist group.”
But federal prosecutors say Daoud set out to commit mass murder in 2012 using a bomb that reeked of gasoline and was filled with wiring and “bags and bags of fertilizer.” It turned out to be inert and created by the FBI, but the feds say it should have scared the teenager. Instead, Daoud got excited.
“He believed he was fulfilling his mission for God,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas insisted as he argued Daoud should be locked up for four decades.
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Whether Daoud was a threat to national security or a loud-mouthed, misguided and mentally troubled teen is central to the question facing U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who said she will decide Daoud’s sentence Monday afternoon. Her decision will bring to a close a complicated, long-running criminal case at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
The judge heard final arguments Wednesday.
“It was never too late to back out from the plan until I pushed the button,” Daoud told the judge as he apologized for his crimes. “I didn’t realize that.”
Daoud’s lawyer, Thomas Anthony Durkin, has repeatedly used the case to criticize the federal government’s handling of the war on terror. He did so again Wednesday, calling it a “political C-Y-A contest.” He said the FBI came up with the idea for a bomb that could inflict mass casualties, not Daoud.
“This kid, this American kid who was lost at sea, deserves a chance to have a life,” Durkin said as he argued for a sentence that could free Daoud by 2021.
Troubled by his lengthy ramblings on the internet, the FBI opened its investigation into Daoud in May 2012. That July, Daoud would cross paths with an undercover agent he believed to be the cousin of someone he had been chatting with online.
Daoud continued to espouse radical ideas in his conversations with the undercover agent, letting the tone of his voice rise and fall wildly and laughing often. He suggested several potential targets for an attack — including Woodfield Mall, an address on Navy Pier and bars and military offices — and he even mentioned flying cars.
In the end, he chose to set off a car bomb at the Cactus Bar and Grill. The undercover agent warned him, “People are gonna die.”
Daoud told him, “Yeah, that’s the point.” He said, “It has to be at least a hundred people.”
After his arrest, Daoud would enlist a fellow inmate in an attempt to have the undercover agent killed. He used the code words “How is Uncle Mike doing” on a recorded jailhouse call to set the plan in motion. Then, in 2015, Daoud also tried to kill another inmate over a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad. The attack left the victim covered in blood.
Daoud admitted the facts around those charges — but denied culpability — in an unusual guilty plea last fall known as an Alford plea.