TERRORISM & HEROISM: ODU Shooter Supported ISIS, Shouted 'Allahu Akbar', Was Killed by ROTC Students

The FBI says the suspect who killed one person and injured two others at Old Dominion University on Thursday has been identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a man who had pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State. 

Dominique Evans, the FBI special agent in charge of the agency's Norfolk field office, said Jalloh had shouted "Allahu Akbar" before the shooting. 

The campus ROTC instructor, Lt. Colonel Brandon Shah, was murdered by the attacker. The terrorist was then neutralized and killed by ROTC students before he could do more damage. FBI Director Kash Patel said the shooter is dead because of "a group of brave students who stepped in." 

The victims were shot in one of the classrooms in the university’s business school building, Constant Hall. Lt. Col. Jimmy Delongchamp, public information officer for the U.S. Army Cadet Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky, said the two wounded students are also members of the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at ODU.

The suspected shooter, Jalloh, is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Sierra Leone. Jalloh, a former member of the Army National Guard, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for an ISIS-related terror plot and was released from federal custody in December 2024.

The Justice Department in 2017 requested a 20-year prison sentence for Jalloh, noting that he had attempted to acquire a gun to carry out a murder plot in the United States. “By putting the idea of this murder plot into religious terms, and by suggesting that murdering members of the US military would be a path to heaven, the defendant showed how strongly committed he was to the deadly ideology” of the Islamic State, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.