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A man who was convicted of plotting to support the Islamic State walked into an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday afternoon, asked if it was an ROTC class, and when someone confirmed that it was, he opened fire. The instructor — a retired military officer — was shot multiple times and later declared dead at a hospital. Two other people were injured. The gunman, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, was killed on the spot by a heroic ROTC student who charged him with a knife. And the question every American should be asking right now is simple: why was this man walking free?
Jalloh was a former member of the Virginia National Guard. In 2017, according to the New York Post, he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison plus five years of supervised release for attempting to provide material support to ISIS and ISIL. Eleven years. That was the price tag our justice system put on conspiring with a terrorist organization that beheaded Americans on camera, burned a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage, and enslaved thousands of women and girls across Iraq and Syria. And Jalloh did not even serve the full sentence. He was released early in December 2024 — just over seven years into an eleven-year term — and placed on supervised release. Fifteen months later, he walked into a Virginia classroom and murdered a man who had spent his career serving this country in uniform.
Let that timeline marinate. A convicted terrorist supporter, out early on good behavior or whatever bureaucratic euphemism the system uses to justify freeing people who swore allegiance to a death cult, targeted a military training class with surgical precision. He did not stumble into the wrong room. He asked. He confirmed. Then he started shooting. This was not random violence. This was a man with an ideological vendetta against the American military, and our federal prison system gave him the opportunity to act on it.
The only reason more people are not dead is because an ROTC student — whose name has not yet been released — did what warriors do. While others scrambled for cover, this student closed the distance and killed Jalloh with a knife. A student. Not a SWAT team, not a federal agent, not a drone strike from 30,000 feet. A young American in a classroom who refused to be a victim. That kid deserves every medal this country can pin on a chest.
This attack did not happen in a vacuum. It came on the same day that an armed assailant rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and opened fire before being killed by armed security. It came days after President Trump warned publicly about Iranian sleeper cells operating in North America — individuals who entered through what he called Biden’s “stupid open border” — and said U.S. authorities were actively monitoring suspected networks. It came as Canadian lawmakers accused their own government of allowing hundreds of Iranian regime-linked operatives to remain in the country despite canceled visas and sanctions. The threat picture is not theoretical. It is stacking up in real time, in American classrooms and American houses of worship, on American soil.
And yet, as these attacks unfolded Thursday, Senate Democrats were busy blocking DHS funding for the third time. The same Department of Homeland Security responsible for tracking threats like Jalloh, the same agency that coordinates with the FBI on domestic terrorism cases, the same apparatus that President Trump has been trying to resource and empower — Democrats voted to keep it unfunded. The political cynicism is breathtaking. They will stand at podiums tomorrow and demand gun control while actively defunding the agencies that are supposed to prevent the next Mohamed Bailor Jalloh from finishing what he started.
The deeper rot here is in a criminal justice system that has lost its mind. An eleven-year sentence for material support of ISIS should mean eleven years, minimum. The fact that Jalloh was released after roughly seven years tells you everything you need to know about how unseriously the federal system treats terrorism convictions once the media spotlight fades. A man who conspired with an organization dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization was deemed fit to re-enter American society, placed on supervised release, and apparently monitored so effectively that he was able to acquire a firearm and execute a targeted attack on a military classroom. Every official who signed off on that early release should be answering questions under oath by the end of the week.
President Trump has been sounding this alarm since before he returned to office. The border was open for four years under Biden. People came in — not just economic migrants looking for work, but individuals with ties to organizations that want Americans dead. Trump said this week that authorities know where most of them are and have eyes on them. Jalloh was not one of those border crossers — he was homegrown, radicalized, and should have been locked away for far longer than he was — but he is part of the same threat ecosystem. The ideology does not care about immigration status. It recruits from within and without, and a system that releases convicted terrorist plotters early is a system that is begging for exactly what happened in Norfolk today.
If a convicted ISIS supporter can be released early and go on to murder an American military instructor, what does that say about how seriously our justice system takes the war on terror?
Providence watches over the bold.
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