Editor's Note
This is the companion piece to "Point: The Questions ODU Owes Lt. Col. Shah's Family an Answer To." ODU Unfiltered is presenting both sides of this difficult discussion because we believe the questions raised in the wake of March 12 deserve serious, factual examination — not political tribalism and not institutional deflection.
This piece makes the case that responsibility for what happened lies not with Old Dominion University but with a chain of federal decisions that put a convicted terrorist back on American soil, in a Virginia suburb, with minimal oversight.
As with the companion piece, we encourage you to read both and reach your own conclusions. Lt. Col. Shah deserves that level of seriousness from all of us.
Before we ask what ODU could have done differently, we should establish what ODU actually knew on the day it re-admitted Mohamed Bailor Jalloh.
The answer is nothing. Not because ODU failed to look. Because the law — specifically, deliberately, and for documented reasons — prohibited them from asking.
The instinct to hold ODU accountable is understandable. Grief looks for somewhere to land, and an institution with a name on a building is easier to confront than a federal bureaucracy that failed quietly over eight years. But the facts of this case point clearly and consistently away from Old Dominion University and toward a chain of federal decisions — in a courtroom, in a prison, in a probation office, and in the Department of Justice — that put a convicted ISIS supporter back on the street with a fraction of the sentence prosecutors asked for and a level of supervision that amounted to a twice-yearly home visit.
ODU is not where this story ends. It is not where this story begins. And it is not where accountability belongs.
What the Law Required of ODU
Virginia Code § 23.1-407.1 prohibits public institutions of higher education from asking applicants about criminal history on admissions applications. This is not a loophole or a technicality. It is the law. The Virginia General Assembly passed it deliberately, and it applies to every public university in the Commonwealth including ODU.
The companion piece to this article correctly notes that Section C of the same statute permits post-admission, pre-enrollment background inquiry and allows an institution to withdraw an offer if they find history that poses a threat. That is accurate. Whether ODU conducted such a check is a fair question.
But here is what that argument requires you to believe: that a post-admission background check, conducted by a university admissions office, would have surfaced a federal terrorism conviction, been routed to someone with the authority to act on it, triggered a legal review of whether the conviction met the statutory threshold for withdrawal of admission, survived likely legal challenge from an applicant whose conviction was nearly a decade old, and resulted in Jalloh being turned away — all within the normal timelines of a university enrollment process.
That is a lot of institutional machinery to run perfectly in order to stop a man that the federal government itself — with every investigative and legal resource available to it — could not manage to keep adequately supervised after releasing him from prison.
The law gave ODU a door. But the person who should have been standing behind that door was a federal probation officer with actual authority over Jalloh's movements, associations, and behavior. That officer was visiting his home twice a year.
Why the Law Exists — and Why It Should
The Ban the Box movement, and the Virginia law that grew out of it, exists because the data on what happens to people with criminal records who cannot access education is not ambiguous. Approximately 70 million Americans have a criminal record of some kind. When those individuals are systematically blocked from higher education — the most proven path to stable employment and lower recidivism — the research consistently shows the same outcome: they are more likely to reoffend, not less.
A person with a college degree is substantially less likely to return to prison than one without. That is not a liberal position or a conservative one. It is a documented fact about what reduces crime in communities. The Virginia law was designed to break a cycle that costs society significantly more than the risk it eliminates by keeping formerly incarcerated people out of classrooms.
The argument that a terrorism conviction should be treated differently from other criminal history is not unreasonable. Terrorism is categorically different from most offenses. But making that distinction requires legislation — a specific carve-out in Virginia code exempting terrorism convictions from Ban the Box protections — not a unilateral decision by a university admissions office operating under an existing law that contains no such exception. ODU cannot be faulted for following the law as written. If the law needs to change, the conversation belongs in Richmond, not in the ODU administration building.
The Sentence That Should Never Have Been Eleven Years
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was arrested in 2016 after a three-month FBI sting operation. During that investigation, he confessed to wanting to carry out a terrorist attack modeled on the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which killed 13 people and wounded dozens more. He had traveled to Nigeria to make contact with ISIS-linked militants. He had communicated with an ISIS virtual plotter based overseas. He had attempted to acquire an AK-47 for what prosecutors described as a plot to murder U.S. military personnel. When he couldn't get the AK-47, he bought an AR-15 the next day.
The Department of Justice asked for 20 years — the statutory maximum.
Judge Liam O'Grady sentenced him to 11.
In their sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutors wrote: "The defendant was fully aware of what he was doing, and the consequences of those actions. His only misgivings seemed to be a fear that he would waver at the critical moment." They argued explicitly for the maximum sentence, describing a man who had made multiple attempts to join ISIS, attempted to arm himself for an attack on the military, and whose expressions of regret at sentencing should be weighed carefully against his documented actions.
The judge disagreed. He imposed 11 years.
Had Jalloh served the DOJ's recommended sentence, he would not have been free until 2037. Had he simply served the full 11-year sentence he received, he would not have been free until 2028. He was instead released in December 2024 — two and a half years early — through a federal drug treatment loophole that terrorism convicts were explicitly not supposed to qualify for.
The Bureau of Prisons confirmed after the attack that Jalloh was released via the 3621(e) provision, which allows inmates to reduce their sentences by completing a substance abuse treatment program. The BOP stated that inmates with terrorism-related convictions were not eligible for this provision — and that Jalloh should not have qualified. The agency said previous leadership had attempted to update the list of excluded offenses to make this explicit, but that those efforts had stalled in collective bargaining negotiations with the correctional workers union.
A man convicted of plotting to murder American soldiers was released from federal prison two and a half years early because of a bureaucratic logjam between prison administrators and a labor union.
ODU had nothing to do with any of that.
Supervised Release That Wasn't
When Jalloh was released in December 2024, he was placed on supervised release — the federal equivalent of probation — with a term running until 2029. The conditions of that release included no contact with terrorist organizations and participation in computer monitoring.
A federal probation officer visited his home in Sterling, Virginia, twice a year.
The last visit before the March 12 attack was in November 2025 — four months earlier. During those four months, Jalloh re-enrolled at ODU, obtained a firearm through a third party who has since been arrested and charged, and carried out a premeditated terrorist attack on a military training class.
A man whose 2016 sting operation file described explicit plans to attack U.S. military personnel was living freely in a suburb of the nation's largest naval installation, attending a university with a 30 percent military-affiliated student body, checking in with federal supervision twice a year.
The question of whether that level of supervision is adequate for someone convicted of terrorism-related offenses — someone who told a federal informant he wanted to do what happened at Fort Hood — does not belong at ODU's door. It belongs to the federal probation system, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ that designed and operated a post-release monitoring framework that clearly was not equal to the threat.
The Question Nobody Is Asking: Why Was He Still Here?
This is the part of this story that has received the least attention and deserves the most.
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was a naturalized U.S. citizen, originally from Sierra Leone. Naturalized citizenship is not unconditional. Federal law provides a mechanism — denaturalization — for revoking the citizenship of a naturalized citizen who obtained that citizenship illegally or who has engaged in conduct fundamentally incompatible with allegiance to the United States.
Providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization while actively plotting the mass murder of American military personnel is not a borderline case for that standard. It is the clearest possible example of conduct incompatible with allegiance to the country that granted citizenship.
Denaturalization would have made Jalloh deportable. Deportation would have returned him to Sierra Leone. He would not have been living in Sterling, Virginia. He would not have re-enrolled at ODU. He would not have been in that classroom on March 12.
This is not an argument about immigration broadly. The immigration debate involves genuinely contested questions of policy, economics, and values where reasonable people hold different positions. This is not one of those cases. This is a specific question about a specific legal tool that exists specifically for situations like this — a naturalized citizen who committed treason against the country that welcomed him — and whether the Department of Justice used it.
The record does not indicate that denaturalization proceedings were pursued. Jalloh served his sentence, was released, and retained his citizenship and his right to remain in the United States. Under what logic does a man who pled guilty to supporting ISIS, who told federal investigators he wanted to carry out a Fort Hood-style massacre of American soldiers, who was described by prosecutors as "fully aware of what he was doing" — retain his status as an American citizen and his right to live in the country he plotted to attack?
There should be common ground here regardless of where one stands on immigration policy. The legal mechanism existed. The conduct met the threshold. The decision not to pursue it — or the failure to even consider it — is a question the Department of Justice has not been asked loudly enough.
The Failure Chain
The full sequence of decisions that put Jalloh in that classroom on March 12 looks like this:
A federal judge sentenced him to 11 years when prosecutors asked for 20. A federal prison released him two and a half years early through a loophole that should have excluded him. A federal probation system monitored a convicted terrorist with twice-yearly home visits. A federal government did not pursue the legal mechanism that existed to remove him from the country after he was convicted of supporting a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Not one of those decisions was made by Old Dominion University.
ODU followed the law. The law prohibited asking about criminal history at admission. The federal government knew exactly who Jalloh was, had convicted him, had supervised his release, and had visited his home four months before he walked into Constant Hall with a gun.
Where This Leaves ODU
None of this means ODU should do nothing. Post-admission background checks — which Virginia law already permits — are a reasonable practice, particularly for re-enrollments by adults entering from circumstances the university cannot see on an application. If ODU was not running those checks, it should be. If Virginia law needs a specific carve-out to allow more robust screening for serious felony convictions, that conversation should happen in the General Assembly.
Better building security for facilities that house military training programs is worth examining. Clear crisis communication that names terrorism as terrorism is a fair expectation for a campus with ODU's military identity.
These are legitimate improvements. They are not accountability for what happened on March 12.
The accountability for March 12 belongs to the federal system that knew who Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was, knew what he had planned, sentenced him to less than half of what prosecutors asked for, released him early through an administrative failure, monitored him with a visit every six months, and never pursued the legal avenue that would have removed him from the country entirely.
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah's family deserves answers. So does this campus. But they deserve the right answers, directed at the right people — and the right people are not in Norfolk.
ODU Unfiltered covers Old Dominion University athletics and institutional affairs with the honesty the official channels won't provide.