A convicted ISIS supporter on supervised release fired on a classroom at Old Dominion University on Thursday, and the .22-caliber weapon he used to do it was allegedly sold to him for $100 by a man the Biden administration chose not to prosecute for straw gun purchases five years earlier.
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, opened fire inside the Virginia university, killing ROTC instructor Lt. Col. Brandon Shah and wounding two others before ROTC students disarmed and shot him dead. The FBI said it is investigating the attack as terrorism.
One day later, Kenya Chapman was charged with making false statements related to selling a weapon to a convicted felon, according to the criminal complaint obtained by Fox News.
According to Fox News, an affidavit filed by an FBI agent states that Chapman stole the .22-caliber gun a year before the shooting and sold it to Jalloh for $100 this week. Jalloh was not permitted to purchase or possess a gun as a convicted felon.
Chapman was no stranger to federal investigators. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigated him in 2021 for three alleged straw purchases of guns, meaning purchases in which a buyer claims to be purchasing a firearm for himself but actually intends to sell it to someone else. All three of those firearms were later recovered at crime scenes, including one connected to a death, court documents said.
The U.S. Department of Justice under the Biden administration declined to prosecute Chapman at that time. Instead, according to the FBI agent's affidavit and a senior DOJ source cited by Fox News, the DOJ asked the ATF to issue Chapman a straw purchaser warning letter. Chapman admitted to selling the guns and wrote a letter of apology, the affidavit said.
A warning letter. For a man whose illegally sold firearms kept turning up at crime scenes. That was the full weight of federal enforcement brought to bear on Kenya Chapman in 2021. Investigators will need to determine whether that decision created the opening that put a .22-caliber weapon into the hands of a convicted terrorist less than five years later.
Jalloh pleaded guilty in 2016 to providing material support for a designated terrorist organization, the Islamic State. He was sentenced in 2017 to 11 years with credit for time served, plus five years of supervised release.
He was released from prison early in December 2024 after completing a drug treatment program that allows inmates to get out up to a year ahead of schedule. Fox News noted that inmates convicted of terrorism-related offenses generally are not eligible for early release programs. Authorities have not publicly confirmed how Jalloh qualified.
At the time of the shooting Thursday, Jalloh remained on supervised release.
His criminal history ran deep. According to the criminal complaint, he was originally arrested July 3, 2016, after authorities said he tried to help procure weapons for what he believed would be an ISIS-inspired attack on U.S. soil and separately attempted to send money to support ISIS. The Department of Justice said he was compelled to leave the U.S. military after he began listening to the online lectures of al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi. The DOJ also said Jalloh praised the July 2015 attack in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in which four U.S. Marines and a Navy sailor died.
Jalloh was a naturalized U.S. citizen from Sierra Leone, as multiple federal sources confirmed to Fox News. A Virginia National Guard spokesperson confirmed that Jalloh served from April 30, 2009, to April 29, 2015, holding the rank of specialist when he left with an honorable discharge. He served in the 276th Engineer Battalion, 91st Troop Command as a combat engineer.
Before his 2017 sentencing, Jalloh wrote a letter to the judge seeking leniency. In it, he claimed he had rejected his former allegiance.
"I reject and deplore terrorism and any groups associated with it, especially ISIL."
He went further, writing that he hated how he allowed himself to be manipulated and describing ISIS propaganda as exploiting "Islamic solidarity and a skewed interpretation of selective verses from the Quran."
"I feel like a complete idiot for accepting such a superficial and dishonest interpretation of Islam and for blindly accepting what I was being told."
Jalloh also claimed in that letter that he "always had deep respect and still have respect for the American people and the American values that I pledged to serve." On Thursday, inside a classroom at Old Dominion University, he demonstrated what that respect looked like in practice.
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah is dead. Two others were wounded. The man responsible had a prior terrorism conviction, was released from prison early through a program that generally excludes terrorism offenders, and was still on supervised release when he carried out the attack the FBI is now investigating as terrorism.
The weapon he used was allegedly sold to him by a man federal investigators had flagged half a decade ago for putting illegally purchased guns into the stream of violent crime, and whom the Biden DOJ rewarded with a letter instead of a prosecution.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether any supervisory failures contributed to Jalloh's ability to obtain a firearm while on supervised release. They have not said what, if any, monitoring was in place. Those answers matter now, because two separate decision points in the federal system, the choice not to prosecute Chapman and the choice to release Jalloh early, converged in a Virginia classroom on Thursday. The ROTC students who charged a gunman and ended the attack did what the system upstream of them failed to do: stop a preventable act of violence before it claimed more lives.
