The narrative of two soldiers and two paths is seductive: one becomes a hero, one becomes a killer. It obscures the harder question of how the institution that trained both failed to see one of them coming. The Old Dominion shooting on March 12, 2026, did not happen in a vacuum. It happened after a former Army National Guardsman with a terrorism conviction was released early from prison and obtained a gun illegally. The parallel-lives framing, as The New York Times and others have used it, hides the institutional blind spots that made the attack possible.
Military Brotherhood Failed to Flag the Threat Before Violence
On March 12, 2026, at approximately 10:49 a.m., Mohamed Bailor Jalloh opened fire inside Constant Hall at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, during an ROTC class. He killed Lt. Col. Brandon A. Shah, an Army officer and ODU alumnus who was teaching that day, and wounded two others. ROTC students in the classroom subdued and killed Jalloh. Jalloh was a former Army National Guardsman who had pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State. He was released from federal custody in December 2024 after receiving sentence reduction through the Bureau of Prisons’ Residential Drug Abuse Program, despite federal policy intended to bar terrorism convicts from such credits. As the Anchorage Daily News reported in March 2026, the BOP had not updated its excluded-offenses list during union negotiations, creating a loophole. The New York Times coverage emphasised the parallel lives of two soldiers. The real story is that military culture and support systems did not prevent a known risk from reaching a campus with an ROTC program and a room full of service members.
Institutional Blind Spots, Not Two Paths
Research on military organisations consistently identifies institutional blind spots: centralised decision-making that discourages subordinate initiative, knowledge cultures that discourage criticism, and reform efforts that focus on vague “culture” instead of accountability and structure. As scholars have noted in the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, biases toward action, relevance, conflict, and hierarchy can prevent criticism from working as a self-correction mechanism. The Old Dominion case is not about one bad apple. It is about how someone with a documented terrorism conviction moved from prison to the community and then to a university classroom with a firearm. The VA and veteran-support data show that 61% of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 were not receiving VA health care in the year before their death. Gaps in outreach and continuity are structural. So is the gap between “we take care of our own” and the reality of who gets flagged, who gets monitored, and who falls through.
Veteran Violence and the Limits of the Brotherhood Narrative
Experts caution against stereotyping veterans as violent. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, has noted that about 23% of public mass shootings involve someone with military service while roughly 13.4% of U.S. men have served, so veterans are somewhat overrepresented but shooter profiles do not fit a single template. At the same time, research using Vietnam-era data has found that military exposure can significantly increase violent offending even decades later, and PTSD and trauma exposure are cited as risk factors. The point is not to blame “veterans” but to ask why systems that are supposed to support and reintegrate service members did not intercept Jalloh. The Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program, Military OneSource, and transition assistance exist precisely because the move from military to civilian life is fraught. The New York Times narrative of two soldiers diverging does not engage with that. It personalises the outcome instead of examining the institutional and policy failures that allowed one of those soldiers to arm himself and walk into Constant Hall.
What This Actually Means
The evidence adds up to a simple conclusion: the Old Dominion shooting is a story about institutional blind spots, not about two paths. Military and veteran support systems, the Bureau of Prisons, and the mechanisms that should have kept a terrorism convict from obtaining a gun all failed. The “military brotherhood” narrative suggests the institution looks after its own. The reality is that one soldier was in the room as an instructor and another entered as a shooter, and the systems that might have stopped the latter did not. The reader should walk away questioning the parallel-lives frame and demanding accountability for the gaps in release, monitoring, and gun enforcement that made the attack possible.
Who Was Mohamed Bailor Jalloh?
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was the gunman in the March 12, 2026, shooting at Old Dominion University. He was a former Army National Guardsman who had pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State (ISIS). He was sentenced in October 2017 to 11 years in federal prison and was released in December 2024 after receiving sentence reduction through the Bureau of Prisons’ Residential Drug Abuse Program. Federal authorities have stated that terrorism convicts should have been barred from that program; a bureaucratic failure allowed him to earn time credits. After his release, he obtained a firearm through an illegal sale despite being prohibited from possessing one. He opened fire in an ROTC classroom at ODU, killed one instructor and wounded two others, and was subdued and killed by ROTC students. The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of terrorism.
Sources
The New York Times, Anchorage Daily News, Northeastern University, Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, VA News