Just weeks before Aaron Driver was arrested in a Winnipeg terrorism investigation in June, his father in northeast Alberta was hoping it would happen.

“I’d rather see him arrested and get help that way than to be left to his own devices, and perhaps do something crazy,” Wayne Driver said two months before police moved in.

It had been a lonely, worrisome six months since agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service told Wayne his troubled 24-year-old son’s passport was seized over his desire to join the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL.

Aaron had been posting support for the group online, alongside photos of gruesome atrocities. He said he supported attacking military officials, despite his own family’s deep roots in the Canadian Forces.

“I still can’t understand how your kid could do something like that, especially when you did your best like any parent to raise him,” said Wayne, an Air Force corporal at CFB Cold Lake who helped train soldiers in Canada’s anti-ISIL bombing mission.

Since being contacted by CSIS officials, Aaron’s father and stepmother — who are both soldiers — tried to get him help, while worrying about how their son’s actions would affect their jobs and reputations.

“All we have really is ourselves,” Wayne said. “We have to be our best support for each other.”

His isolation echoes scores of family members across Canada who don’t know how to spot radicalization and feel helpless once their children enter terrorism investigations.

A military family

Aaron Driver spent his childhood bouncing between provinces as his military family moved between placements. His mother died when he was seven years old and he struggled in school, often running away for days, according to Wayne.

As a teenager, Aaron says he dabbled in drugs and heavy drinking. He claims his father sent him to a halfway house while they lived in Ontario, before he was transferred to Winnipeg.

At age 17, Aaron says he got his girlfriend pregnant, and turned away from a lifestyle of partying to exploring religion. He said he found Islam much more convincing than the Christianity his family instilled in him.

But the girlfriend miscarried, and Aaron decided to restart his life. In 2011, he moved back in with his father in Winnipeg for the first time in years. By then, Wayne says Aaron seemed to be getting his life on track, taking courses to finish his high school degree.

But by 2013, he started acting evasive.

Wayne confronted his son when Aaron stopped showing up to his classes. By February 2014, Wayne and his wife were being transferred to CFB Cold Lake in Alberta. Aaron stayed in Winnipeg.

Wayne didn’t hear much from Aaron until last December, when he got a call from a CSIS agent asking to meet and discuss his son.

“They showed me a file for him that was a couple inches thick,” Wayne said.

The binder showed an extensive collection of tweets and Facebook posts praising ISIL brutality. Under the pseudonym Harun Abdurahman, Aaron attracted 800 followers and said the October attacks on soldiers in Ottawa and Quebec were justified.

“I went through all kinds of emotions right there,” said Wayne. “They’re showing me different pictures of kids being murdered and beheaded and other pictures of people whose faces are half-gone. And my son was liking this, commenting that they deserved it; (that) retribution is good for what Canadian Forces was doing to them overseas.”

As a fourth-generation soldier, those posts struck him particularly hard.

“I went from disbelief at first — I had to look at online names several times just to make sure it was my kid — to shock and disappointment, to grieving for the people that were murdered,” said Wayne, who’s been with the Air Force for 15 years.

Wayne notified his superiors, who moved him to a desk job and lowered his security clearance.

“I could not work with the fighter pilots because of the nature of their business, which, of course, is to training to blow up ISIS targets,” he said.

“After the disappointment came the uncertainty. Well, if I can’t work here, are they going to do something to my security clearance? Am I going to be downgraded back so I can’t be employed anywhere on this base?”

What followed was a week of meetings with military brass and police, with Wayne worried he and his wife, who co-ordinates logistics on the base, would be fired.

“That is the biggest thing; how is it going to impact our life in the military? I don’t want to suddenly be out on the street because my kid’s a dummy.”

In an instant-messaging conversation with The Calgary Herald/Postmedia in late May, Aaron said weeks before his arrest that he identifies as a Muslim, not as a Canadian, and would rather live in a Muslim state.

“Makes no sense to keep people who hate you in the country next to you,” he said just two weeks before his arrest. “It’s short-sighted. They could simply revoke passports for confirmed migrants after they leave Canada.”

Aaron avoided talking about family, and Wayne’s recounting of events.

“First of all, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He played such a small part in raising me, he doesn’t really know me. He and I don’t even share blood,” he claimed in a conversation just days before his arrest.

Instead, Aaron focused on his political and religious views, saying the West was fighting Islam, not ISIL. He said that arresting scores of Muslims in Canada have encouraged more to leave for Syria.

Through at least 12 social media accounts that websites routinely took down, Aaron regularly posted links to ISIL propaganda. He also posted links that show how to encrypt communications to avoid police and intelligence officials.

In May, U.S. police shot two radicalized men dead in Garland, Texas, after they attempted to slaughter attendees of an event to ridicule the Prophet Muhammad. ISIL supporters like Aaron nevertheless said the pair were successful for putting the U.S. on edge.

“I think this worked out beautifully,” he tweeted with a smiley face. “It really is refreshing to see the kuffar (infidels) scrambling to make sense of this.”

In his May chat with The Herald/Postmedia, Aaron said he wasn’t afraid of Bill C-51. The bill, made law in June after his arrest, has made it a criminal offence to promote terror groups online.

“(I’m) a little worried. But at the same time I won’t cower at the threats of the government and give up my rights to speak,” said Aaron, who hasn’t been available since his arrest.

Wayne has had intermittent conversations with his son since last December. Sometimes Aaron responds to a text message within days, while he only answers the phone every couple of months.

The father started reading the Qur’an and went to a local mosque to try understanding his son’s religion. The local imam showed him a religious edict known as a fatwa that denounced ISIL on theological grounds. Aaron picked a fight after Wayne sent it to him.

“He’s gotten to the point where he’s not open or willing to see anyone else’s point,” he said.

For months, Wayne worried what would happen if his son were arrested.

“If he’s going to get help because he’s going to be arrested, then I’m all for it. But if they’re just going to throw him away in a hole some place saying, ‘Well he’s no good, he’s a potential terrorist,’ then that’s no good either.”

Wayne passed on Aaron’s number to a Muslim social-services group in Winnipeg, that unsuccessfully tried to coax him into Arabic classes and free counselling.

In the meanwhile, he tries to keep the channel of conversation flowing.

“He’s almost got to the point where he’s turned his back on us, but not quite there yet,” Wayne said.

“I just let him know that I’m here. Let him know I love him, and it doesn’t matter what he does, he’s always my kid. And I pay the consequences of his actions as well, so be careful what you do.”

After the December visit, military officials directed Wayne and his wife to the mental-health counsellor on the base. Because of Aaron’s support for attacking soldiers, police told them who to call if they felt they were being followed.

A January report by the Department of National Defence warned of an “emerging trend” in which terrorist sympathizers in Canada harass and threaten the family and friends of Canadian military personnel on social media.

Wayne said his wife checks that the doors of their house are locked every evening. Both have been to the base counsellor, but Wayne said they haven’t received any advice on how to deal with a radicalized son.

“We’re by ourselves up here,” Wayne said. “The only people we have to talk to are those not going through the situation.”

In the United Kingdom, police have assigned a family liaison officer to some terrorism cases since 2006. The officer keeps in contact with relatives of people under investigation, suggesting support services and explaining the status of the case.

Some have reportedly helped families coax a loved one away from a violent ideology.

This fall, Calgary police plan to start assigning liaison officers to families of suspects involved in terrorism investigations, likely the first Canadian police force to do so.

Like Wayne, Christianne Boudreau says she had a gut-wrenching feeling when CSIS first approached her.

In 2013, two agents knocked on her door in Calgary and told her that her son, Damian Clairmont, had joined al-Qaida’s branch in Syria.

Damian Clairmont had a troubled childhood after his father left at age 10. He retreated to computer games and drugs, and attempted suicide when he was 17.

He found Islam shortly after, and while Boudreau says she didn’t understand his long beard and demand for halal food, it seemed to ground him.

But after a year, Clairmont started keeping his friends secret, never taking a phone call inside. He started picking small fights over his archaic views on gender, and refused to eat at the table when alcohol was served.

When the news was on, he would occasionally say some killings are justified.

She didn’t know how to respond to his increasingly radical behaviour, and hoped it was just a phase.

In the summer of 2012, 20-year-old Clairmont moved into a Calgary apartment with at least four other young men who later left to join terror groups in Iraq and Syria.

In November 2012, he told his mother he was leaving to study Arabic in Egypt. Instead, he called her from Syria.

For a year, he regularly exchanged messages with his mother on Facebook and by phone, with her begging for him to come home, and Clairmont assuring her that he was happy.

His half-brother Luke, then nine years old, would roll across the living-room floor, crying into the phone, pleading for Clairmont to come home after four years, as he’d promised.

In January 2014, Boudreau got a text message from a number in Syria, asking whether she was Damian’s mother. “He was killed defending his base inside Aleppo city,” the message said.

“The signs were there, but I didn’t know how to read them,” Boudreau said.

Evidence suggests many families are in the same situation.

A recent study of 119 lone-actor terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe found that 64 per cent of families knew their relative was radicalized and intended “to engage in terrorism-related activities because the offender verbally told them.”

“These findings suggest therefore that friends and family can play important roles in efforts that seek to prevent terrorist plots,” according to the study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

And while Boudreau says CSIS agents later told her they knew Clairmont intended to go to Syria, privacy laws prevented authorities from sharing information with parents of adult children.

Anti-terrorism Bill C-51, which was made law in June, now gives spies the power to so.

“This is what we call the threat-disruption strategy. This is critical,” Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said in an interview.

“The sooner we intervene, the lesser will be the impact, both for the individual and society.”

But it’s too late for Boudreau, who is still asking CSIS to help her get the closure and insurance compensation that comes with a death certificate.

Months into her grief, Boudreau reached out to a woman in France with a similar story. She eventually travelled to Europe to meet other mothers whose sons were killed after joining groups in Syria, and learned about non-profit groups formed to tackle extremism.

Since then, Boudreau has become an advocate for families affected by radicalization, speaking at conferences and telling her story in videos made for high school students.

“If I can save just one child, it’s worth everything,” she said.

Earlier this year, Boudreau reached out to Wayne Driver and his wife.

With Canada’s national intervention strategy still in the works, Boudreau also launched a non-profit group in September 2014 to help parents in crisis, like the Driver family.