TOPEKA (WIBW) -- Twenty-one year old Chelsee Link couldn't believe it when she heard it this afternoon.
John T. Booker, a classmate at Topeka West, and still a neighbor of her mother, was arrested and charged with hatching a terror plot to align himself with ISIS and detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley.
"I couldn't believe that I heard his name, and that he was said to be involved in something like this," she said.
Link described Booker as quiet, a student who never got into fights with other students at Topeka West. But he took an interest in history classes and war events, and would argue with the teacher about the circumstances and dates of battles.
"He seemed to know a lot about that, but other than that, didn't say anything in class," she recalled. Link remembers the 20-year old as an ROTC cadet who also stay connected at school to his brother, Jeremy, and was picked on occasionally as being strange.
"And I was outside two years ago with my mom's dog at her house, and saw John walking down the street in 2013. I always tried to be nice to him, and we just had a conversation about how we were doing, and he told me was enlisting in the army."
"But he never mentioned anything like this."
