Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was 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, and was released about 2½ years early, according to prison records.
It wasn’t clear how Jalloh qualified for a prison drug treatment program, which allows inmates to shave up to a year off their sentences. Inmates serving sentences for terrorism-related offenses typically aren’t eligible for such programs or other sentence-reducing credits.
Jalloh, a former member of the Virginia Army National Guard, killed one person and injured two other people in Thursday’s shooting before ROTC students subdued and killed him.
Jalloh was on supervised release when he carried out the attack on Thursday.
Little is publicly known about Jalloh, who was a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone. But court documents depict him as a troubled man who was radicalized by Anwar al-Awlaki, a well-known American imam who became an al-Qaida propagandist.
The Virginia Army National Guard confirmed he served as a specialist from 2009 until 2015, when he was honorably discharged. Jalloh told a government informant he quit the National Guard after hearing lectures from al-Awlaki, according to a 2016 FBI affidavit filed in his criminal case.
