ANALYSIS:
The Trump Justice Department sought double the judge’s prison sentence for Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, meaning that if it had been adopted, the accused Old Dominion University assassin would still be in prison and not free to kill an Army war hero.
The sentencing goes back to Feb. 10, 2017, with the new Trump team in office for 21 days. Jalloh had pleaded guilty to providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a vicious Islamic terror army that slaughters and burns non-Muslims alive.
Prior to the sentencing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, the Trump Justice Department wrote the judge a Feb. 2 memo. “The United States submits that the recommended Guidelines sentence of 240 months [20 years] would be sufficient,” wrote U.S. Attorney Dana Boente.
But District Court Judge Liam O’Grady noted Jalloh’s rough life and time in the Army National Guard, sentencing him to 11 years — about half the sentence sought by the prosecution.
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“You had a terrible upbringing, and you were able to overcome that and come here and become a naturalized citizen, and go to college, and work, and join the National Guard,” Judge O’Grady told him. “And then you took a 90-degree turn and radicalized very quickly.”
Jalloh was released from prison on Dec. 23, 2024, serving eight years of the 11-year sentence. Why he was released early is unclear.
On Thursday, he entered an ODU military classroom and killed Army Lt. Col. Brandon A. Shah, the class instructor and a decorated war hero who piloted attack helicopters in the Middle East. Students then stopped the violence by killing Jalloh, according to law enforcement officials.
Court records reviewed by The Washington Times show that Jalloh in 2015 became interested in joining ISIS. He began making contact online with known ISIS terrorists. He traveled to his birthplace, Sierra Leone, and then to Nigeria, a country where ISIS is today killing mass numbers of Christians. He paid his handlers money and took a dingy bus ride from Nigeria into Niger.
The FBI detected Jalloh’s terrorist adventures and assigned a confidential human source, or CHS, posing as an ISIS terrorist to judge his desire to kill Americans.
The government sentencing memo laid out the interactions:
“During the meeting on April 9, the defendant told the CHS that Mohamed Yousuf Abdulaziz, the terrorist who killed five members of the U.S. military in Tennessee in 2015 was a ‘very good man.’ The defendant also told the CHS in the April 9th meeting that he thinks about conducting an attack all the time, that he was close to doing so at one point, that he knew how to shoot guns and that he had been thinking about conducting an attack similar to the one committed by Nidal Hassan, the U.S. Army Major who killed 13 and injured 32 in a terrorist attack in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.”
The memo quoted Jalloh: “I will support you with whatever you need from me, I need the reward from Allah and my sins to be forgiven.”
On July 2, 2016, “the defendant bought a Stag Arms AR-15 rifle from a local gun store, and he was arrested the next day,” the memo said.
Judge O’Grady told Jalloh, “And while in Africa you decided to join ISIL and go fight on the front lines against the United States and others, and continued to support them after you decided not to go to the front lines by providing them with money. You knew that [terrorist] was trying to hatch a plan to kill servicemen here in the United States, you supported that. You went actively looking for that AK-47.”
As it turned out, seven years later, according to law enforcement, Jalloh was free to go to the ODU campus, find Col. Shah and kill him.
Col. Shah was a professor of military science, teaching ROTC students.
He was a combat helicopter pilot, serving in Iraq and other war zones and earning a host of honors, including two Bronze Stars, the Air Medal with Valor and a Combat Action Badge.
