A federal magistrate in Denver opted to deny bail to a Castle Rock teenager accused of trying to travel to Iraq to join the Islamic State group, citing concerns about his previous death threats to his mother and wanting to avoid any risk of him following through on alleged ambitions of committing mass violence.

After a two-hour hearing Thursday morning, Magistrate N. Reid Neureiter said he has a lot of empathy for the situation of 18-year-old Davin Meyer’s family members because of efforts they made over several years to change the paths of religious extremism he went down. But Neureiter said he ultimately was not prepared to risk releasing Meyer to live with his mother, which his defense lawyer requested, and his mother said she would not have a problem with.

“Despite her genuine testimony, I’m not prepared to put Ms. Meyer at risk,” Neureiter said.

Davin Meyer faces one count of attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charge could carry a prison sentence up to 20 years. Beginning last November, according to federal prosecutors, he communicated with two FBI informants he believed were Islamic State group facilitators about his desire to join the Islamic State group as a fighter. Meyer’s mother reportedly contacted law enforcement in June 2022 with concerns that his beliefs grew increasingly radical, he sought out extremist online content, including videos of killings, and talked openly about violent intentions, prosecutors said.

He also reportedly had threatened in the past to kill his mother, prosecutors said.

She reported Meyer said he wanted to either die as a martyr for the Islamic State group or kill people in the U.S., including military servicemembers and police. Last October, Meyer allegedly said he wanted to build a fertilizer bomb in the U.S., according to his arrest affidavit.

Meyer eventually bought a plane ticket to Germany and then Ankara, Turkey, where he believed he would meet up with Islamic State group members and travel to Iraq. According to prosecutors, he used money given to him by his mother for living expenses after she moved him into his own apartment.

The FBI arrested him right before he got on the flight out of Denver International Airport on July 14.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Hindman identified Meyer’s mother, Deanna Meyer, as the person referenced in his arrest affidavit who contacted law enforcement in June last year about her son’s alleged escalating radicalism in his beliefs and interest in extreme, violent online content. When arguing for denying Meyer bail, Hindman emphasized Meyer managed to communicate with the people he thought were Islamic State group facilitators and to make plans to travel and join the group without his mother knowing, despite her best efforts to get intervention for her son.

Hindman also pointed out Meyer’s refusal to take medication for his mental health, despite his mother’s efforts, and concerns raised about his behavior by a psychiatrist he saw. Meyer has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood, a learning impairment in mathematics and major depressive disorder, according to the affidavit.

“I just don’t believe that she can assure (bail) conditions are followed, nor should we be asking her to,” Hindman said, later adding, “Much of the threat to the community we are discussing is the threat to her.”

Deanna Meyer took to the witness stand Thursday to say she doesn’t believe Meyer living with her, while his case is pending, would put her at risk, and she didn’t appear to directly say her son had threatened her. She said her son has never had friends because of his disabilities and has never been motivated to follow through on things. She said she believes he only went through with his intention to join the Islamic State group because he believed he had found people who understood him in the informants he communicated with.

“I would bet my life he never would’ve done that without that encouragement and feeling like he had a friend” with the same ideology as him, she said.

However, Meyer’s mother disputed the characterization by prosecutors that her son said he planned to build a fertilizer bomb. During her testimony, she said he only told her he knew how, and she responded that concerned her.

“He never said he had an intent to do that,” she said.

Meyer’s attorney, David Kaplan, argued that the FBI or the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office should have acted sooner in the 13 months the informants were in contact with him if they truly saw him as the threat Hindman talked about in Thursday’s hearing. Kaplan said law enforcement ostensibly was making their own judgment calls about any risk Meyer posed to his community as they monitored him.

“I understand the court should be concerned, but so should law enforcement,” he told Neureiter.

In mulling over his decision, Neureiter also mentioned he worries about the possibility of Meyer following the same path a similar situation in Colorado recently took if Neureiter were to grant him pretrial release: A person with mental illness was known to law enforcement for making violent threats, previous charges were dropped (or not pursued), and the person went on to commit mass killings.

Though Neureiter didn’t name the case, both the Club Q and Boulder King Soopers mass shooting bear similar patterns in their defendants’ histories.

“The worst thing I can do is release somebody … and then something like that happens again,” the magistrate said.