A woman who saw her fiance get run over and killed alongside 13 other victims of the Bourbon Street truck attack on New Year’s Day in New Orleans says city officials “need to pay” the consequences after evidently opting against using multiple types of vehicle barriers that could have protected the targeted crowd.
“He died for no reason,” Heather Genusa, 38, said of 43-year-old Brandon Taylor, to whom she was engaged to be married.
“The city really let everyone down that day. It’s a horrible disgrace.”
Genusa delivered her anguished remarks in an interview with the Guardian after the newspaper and other media outlets reported that three types of protective barriers were missing when a US army veteran flying the Islamic State (IS) terror group’s flag drove a pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street early New Year’s Day morning.
Perhaps the most conspicuous were 700lb, steel, L-shaped Archer barriers that can be deployed three or four abreast across a roadway and on sidewalks to stop even speeding motorists by tilting back if struck, wedging under their vehicles and damaging them. One such barrier stopped a motorist who allegedly had a history of mental illness and rammed it while trying to barrel into a crowd of unsuspected spectators at the Pasadena, California, Rose Parade on New Year’s Day 2024.
Police arrested the woman on accusations of assault with a deadly weapon after the barrier protected parade goers from being injured or killed, as Pasadena Now reported.
The administration of the then New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, acquired those Archer barriers, along with other kinds, as part of a broader $40m public safety package in 2017 in hopes of impeding intentional, fatal truck ramming attacks like ones aimed at crowds in Nice, Berlin, London, New York and Barcelona over the preceding year and a half. And New Orleanians saw them in use at times after the city bought them under Landrieu, who left office in early 2019 and was succeeded by LaToya Cantrell.
But sources in law enforcement and emergency management with knowledge of the city’s operations said more recently those barriers had come to be regarded among at least some New Orleans officials as cumbersome to deploy and pick back up.
The Archer barriers require a combination of manual laborers and equipment to put them out and remove them, the sources said. And three sources – independently of each other – all used the phrase “pains in the ass” to describe how at least some of those involved in local public safety viewed dealing with them.
Neither police nor city hall officials immediately responded to a request for comment about when or why New Orleans’ public safety establishment had stopped deploying the Archer barriers.
The New Orleans police department superintendent hired in September 2023, Anne Kirkpatrick, told reporters a day after the attack on Bourbon Street that she had only just been made aware that her agency even had them.
On the same day as Kirkpatrick’s remarks, photos attributed to New Orleans photographer Hunter Holder and published to social media showed crews removing some of the city’s Archer barriers from a municipal storage yard. They can be moved with hand-operated dollies sold by the barriers’ manufacturer, as the local journalist Matthew McBride, a municipal infrastructure watchdog, noted. But in Holder’s photos from 2 January, the crews are working with a crane vehicle.
Later, four Archer barriers were deployed at the start of the first block of Bourbon Street, two apiece on sidewalks flanking a second, distinct type of vehicle-impeding blockade known as a wedge barrier.
That particular, battery-powered wedge barrier was part of the $40m safety package implemented in 2017, too. Reportedly, on the day of the attack, city officials had intentionally left it in its down position – which lets drivers through – because they didn’t want it to be an impediment to first responders such as police, paramedics and firefighters in case of emergencies.
Such wedge barriers can be raised or lowered hydraulically in about two to five seconds, according to manufacturers’ information. That is a key feature on Bourbon Street because it is not a pedestrian-only zone – such as New York’s Times Square or Barcelona’s La Rambla – and is open for use by motorists for much of every day, generally closing to cars in the evenings or when crowds are particularly dense.
Crowds were typically dense early on New Year’s Day, yet officials chose to leave that wedge barrier down. And one of the vehicles to speed right over it was the truck driven by the attacker.
The third type of barrier missing from the first block of Bourbon on the day of the attack – at essentially the street’s entrance – were road-blocking, cylindrical columns known as bollards, a name that is not interchangeable with those of the other barriers.
Bollards that came with New Orleans’ 2017 public safety package were rated to withstand being struck by a medium-sized delivery truck moving at 40mph, the local news outlet Nola.com reported.
But, as Reuters reported, the bollards and their accompanying system became problematic to the incumbent mayoral administration because their tracks became jammed with litter, including Mardi Gras bead necklaces or other trash generated on one of the world’s most festive drags, where people are allowed to imbibe alcohol while walking. They took those bollards down and began replacing them with ones designed to withstand only 10mph impacts – though videos online demonstrate how even toppled-over bollards can badly damage and halt cars that strike or surpass them.
That replacement project had not been completed on the day of the attack. In the bollards’ place was a single patrol cruiser blocking the road at the entrance of Bourbon Street. The attacker easily drove around the cruiser and – with neither the wedge nor Archer barriers deployed – made it to Bourbon Street’s third block before crashing into a construction boom lift. He got into a gunfight with police, was shot dead and was unable to detonate homemade bombs he had previously planted in ice chests further up Bourbon.
That is because Jabbar built those bombs using materials that would typically be set off with a detonator, investigators later determined. But he didn’t have access to a detonator so he instead used an electric match that did not end up working.
In short, Jabbar resorted to “the wrong device to set the [bombs] off,” Joshua Jackson of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Sunday at a news briefing. His “lack of experience and crude nature of putting the device together is the reason why,” Jackson added.
Nonetheless, the attacker had killed 14 revelers – between the ages of 18 and 63 – while injuring dozens more. Other barricades positioned behind the lone patrol cruiser at the foot of Bourbon Street offered little meaningful resistance to the attacker who took aim at the historic heart of the birthplace of jazz and a capital of Carnival.
Some local leaders have since made it a point to argue that having hardened Bourbon Street as a target for the attacker would have simply displaced the violence he inflicted to another part of the city or other communities – not prevented it altogether.
Nonetheless, Cantrell on Sunday said her office had retained a tactical expert to review local safety plans for the 9 February Super Bowl being hosted at New Orleans’s Caesars Superdome as well as the citywide, primarily street celebration of Carnival, culminating in Mardi Gras on 4 March.
None of that much consoled Genusa, who said in tears on Saturday that she could not stop mentally reliving the nightmare she that endured New Year’s morning.
She recalled how Taylor – a resident of Terrytown, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans – had courted her for eight months before they started dating. They dated for another couple of years even though she lived a little more than an hour away from him in Denham Springs, Louisiana.
They eventually decided to marry, and the pair went out to Bourbon Street together to celebrate what their “life was going to be”, Genusa said.
In their final moments together, Taylor and Genusa had stepped out of the Bourbon Street club they were in. Taylor ended up standing near the boom lift into which the attacker crashed and was the last person hit by the pickup, from what Genusa could see. He did not survive.
“Those people who still have their loved ones – hold on to them tight,” Genusa said, doing her best to choke back sobs. “Because at any moment, they can be ripped away from you for the rest of your life.”
She recounted how Taylor made his living as a cook at a local Creole Italian lunch counter and was a rap music devotee. She said he wore his love for New Orleans on his sleeve, literally – his wardrobe primarily consisted of gear emblazoned with the logos of the Saints and Pelicans, the city’s football and basketball teams.
Genusa said she was dreading her 39th birthday in February because she was unsure how anyone expected her to enjoy it without Taylor. She said it was incomprehensible for local officials to have previously seen numerous similar attacks globally – and then conclude it was unlikely anything too horrific would happen if Bourbon Street wasn’t fortified as much as possible on a day that annually draws big crowds.
“Why didn’t they have those barriers out that night?” Genusa said. “Why have them up the next day?”
Of Taylor, she said: “He loved this city so much. And they just let someone rip his heart out.
“And they need to pay [consequences].”
