A gunman opened fire inside a building at Old Dominion University on Wednesday morning, wounding two people before being killed — sending the Norfolk campus into lockdown and rattling a community that has seen more than its share of gun violence in recent years.
The shooting unfolded at Constant Hall, the academic home of ODU’s College of Business, at approximately 10:49 a.m. Two victims were rushed to an area hospital, and the gunman was neutralized by law enforcement. University officials moved quickly, announcing that all classes and campus operations were suspended for the remainder of the day. As the school stated, “Due to an active shooter situation in which the shooter has been neutralized, all classes and operations on the main campus are suspended for the remainder of the day.”
Two Injured, Gunman Dead
Details on the two victims remain limited, but both were transported to a local hospital following the incident inside Constant Hall. The severity of their injuries hadn’t been publicly confirmed as of early afternoon. What is clear is that this wasn’t a near-miss — it was a live, active shooting in the middle of a weekday morning, in a building full of students and faculty. ABC News confirmed the casualty count: two injured, one gunman dead.
Students and staff were ordered to shelter in place while police swept the campus. For many, those are words that carry a specific, visceral weight now — the kind of alert that stops a lecture mid-sentence and sends people sliding under desks or barricading classroom doors. That it happened at a business school hub, in broad daylight, makes it all the harder to process.
A Campus Familiar With Tragedy
This isn’t the first time violence has come to ODU’s doorstep. A previous shooting near a campus dining hall in Lot 3 claimed the lives of two young men — Delanio Vick, 18, and Timothy Williams, 20, both from Norfolk. At the time, police confirmed the grim news plainly: “Two people who were shot last night have died.” That incident, which occurred on a Wednesday night, cast a long shadow over the university and the surrounding community.
Norfolk itself has been no stranger to gun violence. City records show that in a separate, unrelated incident, two men — ages 19 and 22 — suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds and were taken to Sentara Norfolk hospital. The city documented the case through its public alert system. None of these incidents are directly linked, but taken together, they paint a portrait of a city and a campus wrestling with a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away.
What Comes Next
Still, Wednesday’s shooting at Constant Hall stands apart — it happened inside a university building, in the middle of an academic day, and it ended with a body on the floor. Local outlets were quick to cover it. WTVR noted that both injured individuals were taken to an area hospital, though further details on the shooter’s identity or motive had not been publicly released.
How does a campus community move forward after something like this? It’s a question ODU has had to ask before — and one it’ll have to answer again in the days ahead. Counseling resources, security reviews, community forums: the institutional response is predictable by now, almost scripted. What isn’t scripted is the quieter aftermath — the student who takes a different route to class, the professor who flinches at a slammed door, the parent who calls just to hear a voice.
A university is supposed to be a place where the most dangerous thing you face is a difficult exam. That’s becoming harder and harder to take for granted.
