A man who once tried to assist the Islamic State opened fire Thursday in a classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, killing one person and injuring two others before students subdued him, according to the FBI, which said the shooting was being investigated as an act of terrorism.
The university’s police chief said officers found the suspect dead when they arrived minutes after reports that people were being shot inside Constant Hall, where business classes are held. Officials did not describe how the man, identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, died.
“He was not shot,” FBI special agent Dominique Evans, head of the bureau’s Norfolk field office, said during a news conference.
Evans said Jalloh, a former Army National Guard member and naturalized U.S. citizen who is in his mid-30s, shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” before shooting.
She credited ROTC students in the classroom with intervening and stopping the shooting. “If not for them, I’m not sure what else he may have done,” the FBI agent said. Evans said the Old Dominion students in the classroom “showed extreme bravery and courage by containing the shooter and stopping further loss of life.”
In 2017, Jalloh, who once lived in Sterling, Virginia, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for attempting to supply support to the Islamic State terrorist group. He was released from prison two days before Christmas in 2024.
Thursday’s shooting at the university, attended by about 24,000 students in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area, occurred shortly after 10:40 a.m., officials said. One of the surviving victims was listed in critical condition Thursday evening at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, a spokeswoman said. Another victim died at that hospital, she said, and a third self-transported to a medical clinic in Virginia Beach.
Police said the victims are affiliated with Old Dominion University but did not describe them further. Local news reports said two of the victims are members of the university’s ROTC program. The school sits about three miles south of Naval Station Norfolk. Evans would not say if ROTC members were specifically targeted but said her agency is investigating whether Jalloh had coordinated the attack with anyone else.
Garrett Shelton, the university’s police chief, told reporters that calls about the shooting started coming in at about 10:43 a.m., with reports that “people were being shot in one of the classrooms” at Constant Hall.
Norfolk police issued an active-shooter alert and urged students and others on campus to shelter in place.
One student, Logan Hayes, was in Constant Hall taking a test when the fire alarm sounded and he ran out of the building, according to an interview he gave to WAVY-TV. Once outside, he told the station, “I heard about a multitude of gunshots go off and just people screaming.”
Kay Detrick, a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant at the school’s STEM education and professional studies department, said she arrived at the campus around 10:30 a.m. Students were jogging away from Constant Hall and shouting things such as “Shooter” and “There’s a shooter back there,” she said in a phone interview.
Shelton said that officers arrived at 10:47 a.m. and that by 10:50 a.m. “it was determined that the subject that was the active assailant was deceased.” The chief declined to elaborate on how that person died.
The alert was lifted at 11:43 a.m., when officials told students that “there is no longer a threat” on campus.
Classes were canceled for the day on the main campus.
University President Brian O. Hemphill issued a statement saying that the school had “faced a tragedy” on its main campus, and thanking police and other first responders for their “swift response.”
Jalloh pleaded guilty in 2016 after, federal prosecutors said, a member of the Islamic State brokered an introduction between Jalloh and a person in the United States who was working as a confidential informant for the FBI. At the time, prosecutors said, the Islamic State was “actively plotting an attack in the U.S.” that authorities believed would be “carried out with the assistance of Jalloh.” He had purchased a Glock handgun and an AR-15 rifle.
According to the informant, Jalloh told him he did not reenlist in the Virginia Army National Guard after listening to online lectures by the deceased leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Prosecutors said Jalloh visited Africa and met with Islamic State members in Nigeria. He said he was looking to meet a Muslim wife when he reached out to an Islamic State recruiter and instead agreed to take part in a terrorist attack in America.
His attorney at the time described Jalloh as a gullible “follower” driven more by drug use and untreated trauma than radicalism. He was born in Sierra Leone, was sexually abused and was a refugee of civil war.
Federal prosecutors at the time said that Jalloh had praised a man who killed five U.S. military members in a terrorist attack in Tennessee in 2015 and had been thinking about conducting an attack similar to the 2009 terrorist attack at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people.
Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi told reporters that Thursday’s shooting “is not an ODU problem. This is a national sickness.”
Fatehi, who said his wife works at the university and was in lockdown, said that shootings will continue at schools and elsewhere “until there is a political will to break the spell of the cult of gun absolutism.”
Detrick, the PhD candidate, who has been at the school since 2022, said she at first thought the incident was a prank. Then she noticed that the students looked scared.
“I started shaking,” said Detrick, 35. “I texted my husband that there was a shooter and canceled class immediately. I continued to the building and was telling people to turn around and go a different way.”
“I’m pretty shaken up,” she said. “I went and picked up my kids early from school because I wanted to have my family around me.”
Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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