‘The screams, you can’t unhear that’: New Orleans revelry ends in shock and mourning in night of horror

French Quarter residents and workers are navigating life in a crime scene, job uncertainty and trauma after a New Year’s Day attack, Alex Woodward reports

Matthias Hauswirth of New Orleans prays on the street near the scene where a truck plowed into New Year’s Eve revelers on New Year’s Eve, killing at least 14, in a suspected terrorist attack. (AP Phot/George Walker IV)

The city of New Orleans is in shock. Bartenders, musicians and hospitality workers who keep the city running are grieving and nervous. French Quarter residents packed into the historic neighborhood are navigating life in an active crime scene.

A suspected terrorist attack has shaken a city that was primed to celebrate the new year with the weeks-long Carnival season leading up to Mardi Gras — with the Super Bowl crammed right in the middle of it — that’s scheduled to kick off within days. But first, thousands of people in town for the Sugar Bowl joined locals celebrating New Year’s Eve into the early morning hours Wednesday.

The celebrations ended with a U.S. Army veteran plowing a pickup truck waving an ISIS flag into a busy intersection on Bourbon Street, killing at least 14 people and injuring more than two dozen others.

After jerking his truck around a barrier to race down a sidewalk and into a crowd in the street, Shamsud Din Jabbar finally crashed into construction equipment then opened fire with an AR-style rifle before he was fatally shot by police shortly after 3:15 a.m. Wednesday.

A group of New Orleans Police Department officers were captured on a livestream sprinting down Bourbon Street moments after the truck barrelled through the crowd.

“We kept hearing really loud booms. But it wasn’t like gunfire. It was more like a firecracker — like if a firecracker went off like two feet from you,” Krazy Korner bartender Kelly Elizabeth told The Independent. She can be seen on the video mounting her blue scooter outside the Bourbon Street bar at the end of her shift when officers took off running.

“The guy in the pickup truck just punched the gas, and mowed over the barricade and hit pedicab passengers,” one witness told NBC News, holding back tears. “There were just bodies. The screams — you can’t unhear that.”

The FBI has distributed a passport photograph of Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the suspected attacker who killed at least 15 people in New Orleans on January 1. (FBI)

Crowds started running and screaming towards Elizabeth as she kicked off on her scooter. Bartenders and patrons at nearby Prohibition and Bourbon Street Drinkery bars were seeing “bodies everywhere,” she said.

Bourbon Street bar staff expect to be waiting at least 48 hours before they can return. Musicians will be out of work. More than a dozen world-famous restaurants near the scene of the attack don’t yet have a timeline for reopening.

Workers in the tourism-driven economy have already felt unsafe and uncertain through a series of cascading disasters, from hurricanes and COVID-19 to political maneuvering and high-profile acts of violence.

And a series of barricades and “bollards” intended to block attacks from happening in the first place — part of a multi-million dollar, decade-long effort to boost security on the street — had ultimately failed. They were under construction, once again, with plans to be in place for this year’s Super Bowl.

Retractable barriers were first installed at intersections on Bourbon Street starting in 2017 as part of much-larger master plan to make the French Quarter a more family- and pedestrian-friendly tourist destination — plans that repeatedly brushed up against workers and residents who have demanded better investments for locals who fuel the city’s biggest economic driver, not just those who benefit from it.

Those bollards were intended to block an attack like the New Year’s massacre; their installation was partially inspired by a similar attack in France in 2016, when a terrorist plowed into a Bastille Day crowd and killed 86 people.

Law enforcement officers from multiple agencies work the scene on Bourbon Street after at least 15 people were killed after a truck plowed into a crowd in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day. (Getty Images)

In the meantime, parked police cars, more officers and other barriers have been taking the place of permanent barriers.

“We did have a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and they still got around,” NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told reporters Wednesday. “We did indeed have a plan, but the terrorist defeated it.”

New Orleans City Councilman Freddie King, whose district represents the French Quarter, told The Independent that there is “really no timeline as to when they want to open things back up” while the area remains an active crime scene. The night’s party trash still litters the streets, now closed off with yellow police tape.

King hopes to allay fears that the attack would significantly damage how the city lives and works; the attack is an anomaly, he says.

“This is, you know, the world we live in, that you have someone who is hell bent on committing a crime and doing harm,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s very little that you can do to prevent that, to stop that person from doing what they plan on doing. But I do believe that the city is safe.”

Downtown workers, meanwhile, are still checking in on the safety and whereabouts of their co-workers and community after a traumatic event while receiving text messages and emails from their employers and managers about their indefinite closures.

It’s unclear how many people witnessed the attack, and several victims remain in critical condition.

One bartender told The Independent that the fact service workers still don’t know whether members of the community are victims only adds to their pain.

“We’re all nervous to be down there,” Elizabeth said.