Summary
Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
More victims of the New Year’s attack in New Orleans have been identified by their relatives. On Thursday evening, a family from New Orleans said that their relative, 63-year-old Terrence Kennedy, was one of the 14 people killed in the attack. Officials have not yet formally released the names of the victims who were killed.
Details about the victims have emerged as family members and friends speak out. Victims include 18-year-old Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux; Reggie Hunter, a 37-year-old father of two; Tiger Bech, a native of Louisiana and former football player in his late 20s; Nicole Perez, a mother and delicatessen manager from Metairie, Louisiana, also in her late 20s; 21-year-old Hubert Gauthreaux; 18-year-old Kareem Badawi, who was in the middle of his freshman year at the University of Alabama; 25-year-old Matthew Tenedorio, an audiovisual technician; and 25-year-old Billy DiMaio, an account executive.
Military records and media interviews are also painting a clearer portrait of Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old Texas man accused of crashing a truck into New Year’s Day revelers. Jabbar appears to have been born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. He served in the US army for 13 years, including a deployment to Afghanistan. The FBI has said Jabbar had a flag of Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim militant group, on his truck and the bureau is treating the attack as an act of terrorism.
On Thursday, the FBI said investigators believe Jabbar acted alone. Officials had earlier said they believed Jabbar had accomplices. The FBI also announced that it had found no definitive link between the New Orleans attack and the explosion that occurred later on Wednesday outside a hotel owned by Donald Trump in Las Vegas.
A sense of normalcy was returning to New Orleans on Friday as the city continued to deal with the aftermath of the shocking mass murder. The Louisiana city’s famed Bourbon Street nightlife destination reopened amid tight security on Thursday. At the same time, the Sugar Bowl college football game between the US colleges of Notre Dame and Georgia, which was postponed by a day in the interest of national security, was played on Thursday evening.
President Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, are expected to visit New Orleans on Monday. “The president and first lady will grieve with the families and community members impacted by the tragic attack on January 1 and meet with officials on the ground,” the White House announced on Friday.
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Even by Donald Trump’s standards, the message was darkly apocalyptic – evoking memories of the infamous “American carnage” image he conjured at his first inaugural address eight years ago.
“The USA is breaking down,” the president-elect intoned grimly in a message posted on his Truth Social platform at six minutes past midnight on 2 January. He wrote:
A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it.
The pessimistic outpouring was triggered by the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans’s French Quarter that killed 14 – followed hours later by an apparently unconnected event outside Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas, when a Tesla Cybertruck, built by the company owned by the president-elect’s biggest supporter and benefactor, Elon Musk, blew up.
Delivered just 18 days before his return to the White House, Trump’s bleak prognosis seemed an ominous harbinger of counter-violence – especially when combined with his false accompanying message that the episodes confirmed his frequent warnings against open borders and illegal immigrants. Both perpetrators were American-born US citizens.
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