The Situation

At about 10:43 a.m. on Thursday, March 12, 2026, a gunman opened fire on an Army ROTC class in Constant Hall at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, the Army officer leading the class, was killed. Two cadets were wounded. The attacker also died. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force took over the investigation as a suspected act of terrorism.

This article does not name the attacker. The focus is the people in the room.

What Happened

Most detail comes from the cadets themselves, in an Army ROTC video released in April and reported by the Army and the Associated Press.

  • According to those accounts, Lt. Col. Shah put himself between the gunman and the class. Cadets then fought the attacker and subdued him. One cadet secured the weapon, took out the magazine, and cleared the chamber.
  • Cadet Samuel Reineberg found a gunshot wound to Lt. Col. Shah's upper right thigh. Cadet Jeremy Rawlinson gave up his belt to be used as a tourniquet. "On an instant, we switched over to doing combat care," Rawlinson said.
  • Cadet Wesley Myers gave first aid to Cadet Louis Ancheta, who had been shot. The AP describes the wound as a hit to the chest. The Army's account lists it as an abdominal wound.
  • Other cadets called ODU police, sent out an alert to the battalion, and guided officers to the room. The Army reported that the responding SWAT team gave additional medical aid.
  • Lt. Col. Shah died at the hospital. Cadet Ancheta survived.

On March 22, Army leadership presented cadets with eight Meritorious Service Medals and two Purple Hearts. In July, ODU released an independent review by the law firm Cooley LLP. It found the attack would have been "difficult if not impossible to prevent" and recommended improvements in four areas, including emergency response.

What we don't know: how the wounds were treated in detail, how well the improvised tourniquet worked, or what the clinical course was. Nothing released suggests the care given affected the outcome in either direction, and we are not suggesting it did.

The Tactical Medical Lesson

The first minutes belong to whoever is in the room. Before police arrived, the people on scene fought the attacker, secured the weapon, called for help, and started treatment. No response plan, however fast, can reach inside that window. Only training and equipment already in the room can.

Improvised tourniquets are a backup, not a plan. A belt is better than nothing, and these cadets used what they had. As a general principle, improvised tourniquets are less reliable than purpose-built ones: they are harder to tighten enough to stop arterial bleeding and harder to keep tight. That's why the military's TCCC Guidelines call for a CoTCCC-recommended limb tourniquet, and why public bleeding-control kits hold commercial tourniquets. If a room of trained people only has a belt, that's an equipment gap, not a training failure.

A high thigh wound is a hard problem. Injuries near where the leg meets the torso can be difficult to control with any tourniquet, and some bleeding sites aren't amenable to a tourniquet at all. That is what wound packing and direct pressure are for. This is a general principle, not a comment on Lt. Col. Shah's care.

Torso wounds need a different tool. A tourniquet can't help with a chest or abdominal wound. The TCCC Guidelines call for a vented chest seal over an open chest wound and monitoring for tension pneumothorax. Advanced respiration interventions such as finger thoracostomy with needle decompression belong to properly trained and authorized providers. Everyone else needs to recognize the problem and prioritize rapid evacuation.

Emotional load is real. "It's different when it's not a mannequin and it's your friend," Myers said. Training should prepare people for that.

TECC/TCCC Relevance

The cadets described their actions as "combat care," the military TCCC model. For police, campus security, and school staff, the matching civilian framework is Tactical Emergency Casualty Care (TECC), developed by the Committee for Tactical Emergency Casualty Care (C-TECC). The principles overlap: stop major bleeding first, move to safety when you can, and keep caring for the casualty until someone takes over.

The Joint Trauma System Vascular Injury CPG (ID 46) credits "widespread training and use of tourniquets on the modern battlefield" with letting casualties who would have died from extremity bleeding reach surgical care. It also notes how little time there is: for limb salvage, arterial flow must be restored within 3 hours, and within 1 hour or less in hemorrhagic shock. Point-of-injury care buys time to reach surgery. It does not replace surgery.

What Your Agency Should Do Now

  • Campus and school police: map where public bleeding-control kits are located in buildings you cover. Confirm they contain commercial tourniquets and are inspected.
  • Train improvisation as a last resort, and teach its limits. People should know why improvised devices can fail and what to do next.
  • Drill wound packing and direct pressure for high thigh and junctional injuries, not just limb tourniquets.
  • Include chest seal application and evacuation priority for torso wounds in patrol-level training.
  • Rehearse the handoff. Plan how entry officers and SWAT medics take over care that civilians started.
  • Build debriefing and peer support into the plan for everyone who gave care, not only sworn personnel.

Bottom Line

Trained young people did in minutes what no response plan can do from outside the building, with a belt as their tourniquet. The takeaway is to put commercial tourniquets and trained hands wherever people gather, because the first responder is usually whoever is already there.

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