Norfolk, VA, Commonwealth Attorney Ramin Fatehi was desperate to seize the narrative on responsibility for what the FBI are investigating as a terrorist attack on the campus of Old Dominion University that claimed the life of a professor of military science. Two students, both ROTC cadets, were also injured.
During a press conference the day after the shooting, Fatehi claimed he was “constrained in what I can say about the facts of the case.” He was expansive, however, on what he called a “national sickness.” He continued:
We live in a country where people care more about guns than six-year-old children. They care more about guns than they care about synagogue worshippers. And they care more about guns than they do about college students. … Until there is the political will to break the spell of the cult of gun absolutism, you will see more incidents like this.
Fatehi may have been right about a national sickness, but some might argue that the morbidity in question is more directly associated with Fatehi, his political party, and his globalist political benefactors than American gun culture. If Fatehi was unwilling to discuss the facts of the case, we can, as recounted in multiple media accounts.
To recap, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a native of Sierra-Leone, entered a classroom in ODU’s Constant Hall on March 12 and asked repeatedly if the class was for ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps). When someone confirmed it was, Jalloh shouted, “Allahu Akbar” and shot the instructor, Lt. Colonel Brandon Shah, multiple times, killing him. Two students were also wounded by gunfire. Fortunately, members of the class sprung into action to subdue Jalloh, and he was stabbed to death during the scrum.
Jalloh did not possess the firearm he used in his crime lawfully. In fact, he had been sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2017 to providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, the Islamic State group (aka ISIS). ISIS, some may remember, became infamous during the second Obama-Biden administration for propaganda videos where they brutally murdered prisoners by such methods as sawing off their heads, drowning them in cages, and crushing them to death under rocks. President Trump made eradicating ISIS a priority during his first term and put an end to that.
Jalloh was released from his sentence 2 ½ years early in December 2024. That sentence, moreover, was significantly more lenient than the 20 years originally sought by prosecutors, who claimed he wanted to commit a Fort Hood style mass shooting on ISIS’s behalf.
Nevertheless, the sentencing judge, according to a transcript, had praised Jalloh for “overcome[ing]” a “terrible upbringing” and immigrating to the U.S., where Jalloh was granted citizenship, went to college, and joined the National Guard. Notwithstanding that Jollah’s response to being granted those opportunities was to radicalize and embark on a plan to murder U.S. citizens, the judge determined his sentence should “reflect the good things [he had] done as well as the horrendous things.”
Of course, it might have been just as rational to view Jalloh’s criminal conduct after serving six years in the National Guard as all that much more egregious, considering he wanted to betray his own comrades in uniform.
In any case, not only was Jalloh given leniency in this criminal case, he was allowed to continue his college studies upon release from prison and was a student of ODU at the time of the murders he committed. Considering it took him less than a year and a half to reoffend upon his release early from an already light sentence, and in a manner that echoed his original murderous plot, Jalloh did not deserve the consideration he was given repeatedly by the U.S. government, including as an immigrant, a service member, and a person facing U.S. justice.
It wasn’t just Jalloh, however, who was treated with kid gloves by the U.S. justice system. According to a CNN report, Kenya Mcchell Chapman, the man now accused of illegally selling Jalloh the handgun Jalloh used in his ODU crime, had himself in 2021 been under federal investigation for illegally straw-purchasing guns. One of the firearms, according to an affidavit supporting Champman’s arrest warrant, was recovered from the shooter in a homicide only weeks or months after it was purchased. Yet the Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ), for reasons unexplained in the report, declined to prosecute on the previous episodes, instead issuing Chapman a “warning letter” and requiring him to write “a letter of apology.”
Chapman reportedly admitted to federal agents who searched his house after he was linked to Jalloh by the latter’s phone that he had stolen the gun from a car in Newport News, VA, and sold it to Jalloh for $100. Chapman, the CNN report stated, acknowledged knowing Jalloh had spent time behind bars but denied knowing that Jalloh was a felon or what Jalloh intended to do with the gun.
Readers of this page who are familiar with the Biden-Harris administration’s decidedly more aggressive posture toward accused unlicensed firearms dealer Bryan Malinowski will find DOJ’s handling of Chapman’s case even more bitterly ironic.
Finally, a Fox News report indicated that in his bid for the prosecutor’s office in Norfolk, Fatehi’s “top two donors include[d] the Soros-subsidized Justice and Public Safety PAC and Democracy PAC,” which donated more than $650,000 to his campaign fund between 2021 and 2025.
Fatehi himself certainly fits the profile of the “progressive” and “reform minded” prosecutors that Soros is infamous for funding, with a Virginia Mercury article from Feb. 2023 ascribing to Fatehi the opinion that “jail or prison should be a last resort[.]“ That same report noted that Fatehi’s tenure coincided with Norfolk’s highest number of murders in 30 years in 2022, as well as “a string of courtroom failures in high-profile murder cases and a spate of departures” of career prosecutors from his office.
One such prosecutor, the Mercury noted, stated during an interview: “If you look at the homicides (in 2022), you have a marked increase of people just killing each other in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses.” He added, “That change … boils down to people thinking they can get away with it.”
Small wonder then that Fatehi wanted to find something, anything, other than the lenient immigration and criminal justice policies favored by his Democrat party as contributing factors to the ODU crime.
Also unmentioned by Fatehi was that the ODU attack was terminated by an act of defensive force by heroic ROTC cadets who, prohibited from carrying firearms by ODU policy, ending the murderous rampage by stabbing Jalloh to death.
What Fatehi meant by invoking “synagogue worshippers” was not entirely clear. But on the same day of the ODU attack, another terrorist incident, this one in West Bloomfield, MI, ended when private security forces at a Jewish synagogue engaged the attacker with gunfire, and he shot himself. The deceased suspect in that case was Lebanese-born U.S. citizen Ayman Mohamad Ghazali.
Ghazali had rammed the temple with his truck, which then became engulfed in flames as a gunfight erupted between him and temple security. According to an NBC report, Ghazali had lost two brothers the week before during an Israeli airstrike on his hometown; both were “known to be members of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed military group … .” The FBI is investigating that incident, the article noted, as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer (D) had a blunter assessment of the attacker’s motive, stating during a briefing: “It was hate, plain and simple.”
Fortunately, Ghazali himself was the only fatality, while the head of temple security sustained injuries from being struck by Ghazali’s vehicle, and some first responders were treated at a hospital for smoke inhalation.
Whatever anyone wants to ascribe as the root causes of these attacks, there is no dispute that they were stopped by brave civilians willing to engage the assailants with lethal force. That, and that alone, prevented further loss of life when all else failed.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fatehi’s Democrat party is on the verge on enacting the most sweeping slate of gun control – all aimed squarely at law-abiding citizens – the state has ever seen.
People can draw their own conclusions, but it seems to us the Soros-backed Democrat doth protest too much.
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