The ROTC cadets getting ready to leave their class at Old Dominion University in Virginia last month had never seen the stranger who entered the room, and they thought maybe he was someone early for the next class.
But he seemed nervous when he asked whether it was an ROTC class.
“I wasn’t thinking about what that question really meant,” Louis Ancheta said.
Then the man reached into his waist, pulled out a Glock handgun and shouted something — some heard it as “Allahu Akbar” — and began firing, the cadets said in a video the Army ROTC shared online Thursday.
“My first thought was ‘Is this a drill?’ Because we just talked about force protection,” cadet Oshea Bego said in the video recounting the events of March 12, when a gunman opened fire on the class at the university in Norfolk.
“And then, like, when it actually started to happen, I was like, ‘Oh, this is real,’” cadet Samora Robinson said. “Everybody had dropped down to the ground.”
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, who had previously been convicted of supporting ISIS, fatally shot the instructor, Army Lt. Col. Brandon A. Shah, and wounded two other people, officials said. Authorities said the attack was an act of terrorism.
Jalloh, 36, was also killed. Cadets in the video described stabbing him with their pocketknives during a desperate struggle for the gun.
Shah lunged at Jalloh and started wrestling with him as both men were upright and standing, Ancheta said.
Ancheta said that he opened his pocketknife as Jalloh fired two shots and that one of the stray shots struck him, leaving a graze wound.
“Col. Shah finally turns him around. So then after that, I’m like, I’m ready, so I just go in there,” Ancheta said. “Just start stabbing him. As I’m stabbing him, other cadets jump in.”
A couple of people stabbed at Jalloh during the struggle, and others punched at him before everyone fell to the ground, cadets said in the video.
When they got the handgun away from Jalloh, its magazine was empty and one round was left in the chamber, cadet Wesley Myers said.
Shah had been shot in the upper thigh. The students said they used a belt as a tourniquet.
They called police but didn’t know whether this was the only gunman, the students said. One cadet met police and led them to the scene of the shooting and the wounded.
They later learned that Shah had died.
Cadet Jah-Ire Urtarte said Shah was almost like a second father. “He saw the best in us,” he said.
The students said Shah had a saying: “Be bold, be quick, be gone.”
“If he didn’t lunge at him, you know, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Urtarte said.
