Article content continued

In February 2014, the teen, who cannot be identified because of his age, took his parents’ credit card information and tried to send money through Western Union to an unnamed group in Lebanon supporting the fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The transfer was refused, his father cancelled the credit cards, but three months later, the teen had again acquired their credit card information and this time tried to buy a one-way ticket to Gaziantep, Turkey, near the border with Syria. Again, the transaction was blocked, and the father confronted his son.

“I said, ‘Why are you doing that? It is not a battle.… It is terrorism.… You’re not going to go to paradise by dying there. You are going to kill innocent people. You will commit crimes there,’ ” the father later recounted to police. “He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t answer.”

In 2013, they learned he had begun consulting jihadi material on the Internet when he was 13, holed up in his bedroom. They put parental controls on his computer, but he got around them. A police search of his hard drive found 10 issues of the al-Qaida propaganda magazine Inspire along with the Lone Mujahid Pocketbook offering advice for attacks.

After the attempt to buy a plane ticket, his parents confiscated his computer for the summer. Then in late September 2014, they became alarmed after finding a scrap of paper with an unfamiliar phone number in his pocket. When he disappeared from the house on Sept. 28, 2014, the day of the Montreal marathon, they feared he could “commit an attack because of his interest in the Islamic State,” the judge writes in her ruling.