Fear and sadness in New Orleans after the attack: ‘We cannot let the terrorists win’

Bourbon Street, the legendary street that is the symbol of the New Orleans Mardi Gras and all-night revelry, reopened to the public on Thursday. Music drifting through the doors of its bars strives to recreate an air of normalcy. Street vendors, as on countless other days, offer necklaces in Mardi Gras colors — red, green, and yellow — alongside charms meant to ward off the evil eye.

Yet, the veneer of normalcy fades quickly. Just over 24 hours earlier, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old war veteran, drove a rented truck into a crowd celebrating the New Year and opened fire. The attack left 14 dead and 35 injured before police fatally shot Jabbar. He was carrying an Islamic State (ISIS) flag in what the FBI has classified as a terror attack, though they have ruled out the involvement of accomplices.

At the corner of Bourbon Street and Canal Road, a hallmark of the French Quarter and the historic heart of New Orleans, Mayor LaToya Cantrell and local religious leaders placed 14 yellow roses, each representing one of the victims. Passersby have added Mardi Gras beads to the makeshift memorial. A woman pauses, crossing herself as tears fill her eyes. The faint scent of disinfectant lingers, a somber reminder that cleanup crews have only just completed their efforts to sanitize the street after the tragedy.

Only a handful of tourists now wander along the sidewalks of Bourbon Street, a place immortalized in countless songs and Hollywood films. Once a vibrant must-see destination for visitors to New Orleans, the long, narrow corridor — lined with historic buildings, lively bars, bustling restaurants, and late-night clubs — is now eerily subdued. Typically, it teems with joyous energy, where the melodies of street musicians blend seamlessly with music spilling out from bar after bar, as crowds revel in the spectacle from sidewalks and balconies.

Those who walk along Bourbon Street now do so in solemn silence. A heavy police presence is evident, heightened by the nearby celebration of one of the city’s marquee events — the Sugar Bowl college football game between the University of Georgia and Notre Dame, which draws a crowd of around 80,000 people. Originally scheduled for Wednesday, the game was postponed to Thursday in the wake of the tragedy.

Chris Little, who lives nearby and works on Bourbon Street, point to a discolored patch of asphalt. That’s exactly where Jabbar was shot dead by police, he says. Though he wasn’t present during the incident, Little recalls hearing the chaos unfold.

The attacker also planted two improvised explosive devices nearby — both hidden in coolers, one on Bourbon Street and another two blocks away. Security cameras captured curious passersby inspecting the coolers, which initially led investigators to suspect Jabbar had accomplices. The bombs failed to detonate. “He tried to place one of those devices under my house,” says Little, “imagine what could have happened if it had gone off.”

The fact that authorities have since confirmed that Jabbar acted alone has brought some reassurance to New Orleans residents, says Little. But others, like Jonah, a retiree also living nearby, admit to still feeling nervous. “He acted alone, yes, but once something like this has happened it can happen again, you know?”

Just a few blocks away, the scene on Poydras Avenue, the main thoroughfare leading to the Superdome where the Sugar Bowl was being held, is markedly different. Thousands of fans, clad in the red jerseys of the University of Georgia and the green of Notre Dame, crowd the sidewalk cafés hours before kickoff, chanting team songs.

“It’s horrible what happened, and of course we are very aware of that. But we cannot let the terrorists win. If we allow ourselves to be cowed, if we stop doing what we would normally do, we let them win,” says Ed, who travelled from Georgia with his girlfriend, Charlene, to attend the competition.

The Superdome stadium has stepped up security. Helicopters fly overhead. Dog teams scour the facility for abnormalities.

Research in Houston

FBI agents have expanded their investigation to Houston, Jabbar’s hometown, in an effort to uncover how the attack was planned. They are examining the series of events that led the war veteran to rent a pickup truck, load it with an ISIS flag and what appear to be bomb-making materials, and then drive it at high speed down a sidewalk. He bypassed police vehicles that had been stationed to block traffic for New Year’s Eve celebrations on Bourbon Street.

Although Jabbar — who converted to Islam and reportedly become radicalized in recent years — was born in Texas and raised in the United States — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump insists on blaming illegal immigrants for the tragedy. “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during rallies and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”

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