Editor's Note
ODU Unfiltered is primarily a sports and university affairs blog. We do not take this subject matter lightly, and we do not approach it casually. Lt. Col. Brandon Shah was a member of the ODU community, a decorated veteran, and the kind of person this institution should be proud to call a Monarch. He deserved better than what happened to him on March 12.
The following is not an attack on ODU. It is an honest examination of questions that deserve honest answers — and that we believe Lt. Col. Shah's family, the students who were in that classroom, and this campus community are owed.
A companion counterpoint piece presents the other side of this argument. We encourage you to read both.
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah walked into Constant Hall on the morning of March 12, 2026, to teach an ROTC class. He was an ODU alumnus who had flown helicopters over Iraq, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe. He had come back to this campus to train the next generation of officers. He did not come home.
The man who killed him was a current ODU student. He had been convicted a decade ago of providing material support to ISIS, sentenced to federal prison, and released in December 2024. He re-enrolled at ODU approximately six months later. He walked into that classroom carrying a gun, asked if it was an ROTC class, and opened fire when someone said yes.
The FBI confirmed it as an act of terrorism within hours. The ROTC students in that room — unarmed college students — physically subdued and killed the attacker.
What follows is not about assigning blame. It is about asking whether the institutions responsible for this campus's safety — including ODU itself — had tools available to them that were not used, policies that needed to exist but didn't, and a framework for understanding threats that was not equal to the one that materialized on March 12.
What Virginia Law Actually Permits — and What ODU Did With It
ODU's statement in the immediate aftermath of the attack said the university had "no knowledge of any prior criminal history" for Mohamed Bailor Jalloh. That statement has been widely treated as the end of the conversation about ODU's role. It should be the beginning of one.
Virginia's Ban the Box law — Code § 23.1-407.1 — does prohibit public colleges from asking about criminal history on the initial admissions application. That is correct. But the same statute contains a provision that receives almost no coverage in this discussion: Section C explicitly permits any public institution of higher education to inquire into the criminal history of an applicant who has already been admitted but has not yet enrolled. The same section states that any institution may withdraw an offer of admission to an individual whose criminal history is subsequently found to pose a threat to the institution's community.
The law gave ODU a door. The question nobody is asking publicly is whether ODU walked through it.
A post-admission background check is not a violation of Ban the Box. It is a tool the Virginia legislature specifically preserved in the same statute that removed criminal history from the application itself. A man re-enrolling at a university six months after release from federal prison for a terrorism conviction — had that check been run — would have returned a result that any reasonable security review would have escalated.
ODU has not said whether a post-admission check was conducted. That question deserves a direct answer.
A Campus Built for Open Access in a City Built for Military Service
ODU serves approximately 24,000 students. Nearly 30 percent of them are military-affiliated. The university sits in the Hampton Roads metro area — home to Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, multiple other major installations, and one of the highest concentrations of active duty and veteran military personnel in the United States. This is not a coincidence. ODU has built a meaningful part of its identity and enrollment around serving the military community.
That identity comes with a threat profile that most universities do not carry.
Jalloh did not choose his target randomly. Court records describe a man who, a decade ago, explicitly wanted to carry out an attack on U.S. military personnel modeled after Fort Hood. He re-enrolled at a military-connected university. He walked into a building on that campus and confirmed — before shooting — that he was in the right room. This was a targeted, premeditated act of terrorism against people in military training.
Constant Hall is a standard university classroom building. There are no access controls. Anyone can walk in. On the morning of March 12, someone did.
The question of whether buildings used for ROTC training — military training, on a campus with a known military identity and a documented terrorist threat environment in the broader region — should have any additional access measures is worth asking. Not because any single security measure is guaranteed to stop a determined attacker. But because soft targets are chosen for a reason, and a campus that houses military training programs in open-access buildings is making a security decision whether it acknowledges it or not.
The Concealed Carry Question
Virginia does not permit concealed carry on public university campuses. Faculty, staff, students, and visitors — including those who hold valid concealed handgun permits — are prohibited from carrying firearms on campus. ODU, as a public institution, follows state law.
The ROTC students in that classroom stopped this attack. They did it with their hands. They are being rightly praised for extraordinary courage under circumstances no college student should ever face.
But the attack was stopped only after Lt. Col. Shah was shot and two others were wounded. The attacker had a firearm. The people in that room did not.
The argument for allowing lawful concealed carry on campus is not that it would prevent every attack. It is that attacks of this nature — ideologically motivated, targeted, carried out in enclosed spaces — consistently exploit the certainty that victims are unarmed. The research on deterrence is debated, and reasonable people disagree about the right policy. But the question of whether Virginia's blanket prohibition on campus carry serves the safety interests of a university with ODU's specific military character and threat profile is a legitimate one that deserves engagement rather than dismissal.
The ROTC students in that room demonstrated that human beings will fight back when they have no other choice. The question is whether they should have to.
The Language of Leadership Matters
In the hours following the shooting, President Hemphill issued statements describing the events as a "tragedy" and a "senseless act of violence." Those words reflect genuine grief and are not wrong in themselves. But they are incomplete in a specific and important way.
The FBI confirmed within hours that this was being investigated as an act of terrorism. Rep. Jennifer Kiggans called it terrorism that day. FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed the terrorism designation on social media. The attacker had a prior terrorism conviction, shouted a phrase associated with terrorist attacks before opening fire, and specifically targeted military personnel. This was not ambiguous.
When an institution's leader describes a terrorist attack as a "senseless act of violence," the message sent — unintentionally or not — is that the institution does not yet understand what happened to it. For a campus that is nearly 30 percent military-affiliated, where students and faculty have strong ties to the armed forces, the failure to name this accurately in the initial hours was noticed.
Words matter in crisis leadership not because they change what happened, but because they define what the institution intends to do about it. A campus that suffered a "tragedy" and a campus that suffered a "terrorist attack targeting military personnel" are understood differently by the people who have to decide whether to walk back into Constant Hall next semester. They require different institutional responses. They communicate different levels of seriousness about the threat.
ODU is a community that has military service woven into its identity. The people in that community deserved to hear their president name what happened to them.
What This Is Not
This article is not an argument that ODU is responsible for Jalloh's actions. It is not a claim that any single policy change would have prevented this attack with certainty. It is not a condemnation of the university's emergency response, which by all accounts was swift and effective.
It is an argument that three specific, actionable questions deserve direct answers:
- Did ODU conduct a post-admission background check on Jalloh when he re-enrolled in 2025, as Virginia law permits? If not, why not — and will that practice change?
- Does ODU have a specific security framework for facilities used for military training, given the campus's identity and the documented threat environment in the Hampton Roads region? If not, should it?
- Does ODU's crisis communication framework distinguish between generic campus violence and targeted acts of terrorism? If not, should it — especially for an institution where nearly one in three students has a military connection?
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah came back to this campus because he believed in what ODU was building. He gave his life in a classroom. The least this institution owes him — and the students who were in that room with him, and the campus community processing what happened — is an honest accounting of whether anything could have been done differently.
That accounting starts with answering the questions.
ODU Unfiltered covers Old Dominion University athletics and institutional affairs with the honesty the official channels won't provide.