“I took his eye out”: A first-hand account reveals what happened inside the Old Dominion shooting – and how students fought back

In a raw and deeply personal conversation on the Shawn Ryan Show, Samuel Reineberg gave one of the clearest first-hand accounts yet of what unfolded inside the classroom during the Old Dominion University shooting, and his version of events makes one thing painfully clear: the attack was over in minutes, but for the people inside that room, it turned into a lifetime memory almost instantly.

Reineberg told Shawn Ryan that the day had started like any other class day, right down to the small details that would later stick in his mind for reasons he could not have known at the time. He said he usually liked sitting near the front, but that day he chose a seat near the back of the room, next to one of his partners, as the class moved through presentations and critiques.

According to Reineberg, the group had already finished its briefings and Colonel Shaw was wrapping up the session with feedback, humor, and the kind of normal classroom energy that now feels eerie in hindsight. He said Shaw even joked with him during the critique, the sort of quick back-and-forth that made the class feel ordinary and familiar, right before everything stopped being ordinary at all.

That is one of the hardest parts of accounts like this. They always seem to begin with the everyday. A class nearly over. A teacher making closing remarks. Students waiting to be let go. Then, in seconds, normal life is broken apart.

A Stranger Walked In And Asked One Question

Reineberg told Ryan the moment that stayed with him most sharply was the entrance of a man he had never seen before. He said the classroom door was normally locked from the outside and students had to be let in, which made the man’s appearance feel strange even before the shooting began.

He described the man as wearing dark clothing, a dark hoodie, gloves, and a longer beard, and said he appeared nervous. According to Reineberg, the man asked, “Is this ROTC or is this a seminar?” and when nobody answered at first, he repeated the question.

Someone near the front finally responded that yes, it was ROTC. Reineberg said that was when the man drew a gun, shouted a phrase in Arabic, and opened fire.

What followed, in Reineberg’s telling, was not a slow-motion movie scene where everyone neatly processes what is happening. It was confusion, shock, screaming, instinct, and movement all at once. He told Ryan that even though he had been shot at before in other contexts, it still took a second or two for his mind to catch up and realize what was happening inside that classroom.

That detail matters because it cuts through the false idea that people in life-threatening moments always react with instant clarity. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes the brain lags just behind the body. But in this case, once that moment passed, Reineberg and several others moved fast.

Colonel Shaw Moved Toward The Threat

One of the most striking parts of Reineberg’s account was his description of Colonel Shaw’s response. According to him, Shaw stepped forward and physically engaged the shooter, grabbing him and pulling him into a bear hug even while shots were being fired.

That action appears to have changed everything.

Reineberg said that by the time he got to the front of the classroom, another cadet was already on top of the attacker, and within moments there were four of them involved in the struggle. They were not reacting with polished choreography. They were reacting with urgency, trying to keep the gun from being turned back toward classmates and trying to stop the attack before more people were hit.

As Reineberg described it to Ryan, the whole focus became controlling the weapon and pinning the shooter against the wall. He said the attacker kept trying to fire and kept trying to keep the fight going, while the students fought to get the gun pointed away from everyone else in the room.

At some point during that struggle, Reineberg said he turned and shouted for everyone else to get out, to run, and to call 911. He later learned that some of his classmates remembered his face as the last thing they saw before escaping, which says a lot about just how close and chaotic this fight was.

This is also the part of the story that leaves the strongest impression. The students in that room did not wait for someone else to save them. In the middle of terror and confusion, several of them moved straight toward the danger.

“I Took His Eye Out” And The Fight Finally Ended

During the interview, Ryan asked Reineberg directly about the moment he said, “I took his eye out,” and Reineberg confirmed it in a matter-of-fact way, without sounding boastful or dramatic. He explained it as part of the hand-to-hand struggle to stop the attacker, not as a line meant to shock people.

That tone is important. Nothing in his description sounded celebratory. It sounded like someone trying to explain how desperate and physical the fight became before the weapon was finally taken away and the attacker was subdued.

Reineberg said that by the time the struggle ended, the shooter had been overpowered, the gun was no longer the immediate threat, and his attention shifted completely away from the attacker and onto Colonel Shaw. In his words, he no longer cared about the shooter at that point. His concern was getting aid to the man who had stepped in first and had taken the brunt of the attack.

That transition, from fighting to lifesaving, came fast. Reineberg said Shaw tried to stand and then collapsed, and from there the students went straight into emergency care mode. He described checking for wounds, looking for blood loss, opening Shaw’s airway, and using belts as makeshift tourniquets before officers arrived with a real one.

Even in the middle of panic, Reineberg’s account showed how training and instinct can take over. He told Ryan he was not really thinking through each action in a calm, deliberate way. He was just moving, doing what had to be done, and trying to keep Shaw alive until help got there.

Students Fought, Then They Worked To Save A Life

Some of the most powerful moments in the interview came after the attacker had been stopped. Reineberg said the students moved Shaw into the hallway so they would have more room to work, then kept tightening the improvised tourniquets and trying to stabilize him while waiting for responding officers and medics.

When the first officers arrived, Reineberg said he immediately noticed the female officer had a tourniquet on the front of her gear and demanded it from her so they could replace the makeshift one with something better. Then, with officers and cadets working together, they carried Shaw down two flights of stairs and out of the building.

By then, Reineberg said, students were outside with phones, police were rushing past, and the whole scene had shifted from classroom chaos to emergency response. Yet even there, he said Shaw was still conscious at points, asking for his inhaler and looking at him with wide eyes as they tried to keep him alive.

Reineberg’s description of those moments was intense without being theatrical. It sounded like what trauma usually sounds like when it is recalled by someone who lived through it: fragments, sharp images, physical memory, and the sense that everything happened both too fast and in unbearable detail.

A Story About Violence – And Resistance

What makes this interview stand out is not just that it offers new details about the Old Dominion shooting. It also gives a direct account of how people inside the room responded when the attack began, and that response was not passive.

Ryan’s interview with Reineberg shows a classroom full of people who were caught off guard, terrified, and thrown into the worst kind of situation, but it also shows that several of them refused to freeze once the reality became clear. Colonel Shaw moved toward the attacker. Cadets piled in. The weapon was fought over. Classmates were told to run. Then the same students who had just fought for survival turned immediately to trauma care.

That is not something most people are ever asked to do, and it is worth saying plainly that many lives may have depended on how quickly those decisions were made.

There will be more official reviews, more headlines, and more debate about how the attack happened in the first place. But Reineberg’s first-hand account, as told to Shawn Ryan, centers the part of the story that can get lost once the broader politics and public arguments take over. Inside that room, students and an instructor fought back, and then they fought just as hard to keep each other alive.

It is a hard story, but it is also a story of resistance under pressure, and that is why people will remember it.