President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited New Orleans today to pay tribute to the victims of the New Year’s Day terror attack that killed fourteen people. Wearing dark aviator sunglasses, the president and his wife laid flowers at the makeshift memorial erected for the victims on the sidewalk in the French Quarter’s Bourbon Street, bowing their heads in silent reflection. They then moved on towards St. Louis Cathedral for a private meeting with victims’ families and survivors.
At approximately 3:15 a.m. on January 1st Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an Army veteran from Texas, drove a pickup truck past a police barrier onto the pedestrian-filled Bourbon Street, killing fourteen people and wounding 30 more as he drove for over two blocks before crashing and being killed himself in a shootout with police. Authorities also found undetonated explosives wired to remote denotation along the street ahead of the truck, hidden in coolers.
The 42-year-old Jabbar flew an ISIS flag and had pledged allegiance to the Islamic extremist group, although the FBI says that he acted alone. Speaking yesterday, President Biden said that since the attack, he and the intelligence community had “established beyond any reasonable doubt that New Orleans was an act of a single man.”
“I’ve been there,” the president said of the bereaved families, evoking his own losses. Biden’s first wife and daughter died in a car crash in 1972.
