



NEW ORLEANS >> President Joe Biden met with grieving families, attended a prayer service and stopped at a makeshift memorial in New Orleans on Monday in honor of the victims of last week’s deadly New Year’s attack in the city’s historic French Quarter.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden made their first stop in the city at a memorial that sprung up on Bourbon Street, where an Army veteran drove a truck into revelers, killing 14 and injuring 30 more.
Flowers and messages had been left at the base of more than 14 crosses erected on the sidewalk. After Jill Biden placed white flowers at the memorial, she and the president stood in silence and bowed their heads.
Joe Biden crossed himself, and the couple headed to the historic St. Louis Cathedral nearby. The president and first lady met privately with the families of those killed, survivors and local law enforcement. Afterward, they attended an interfaith prayer service, where a rendition of “Amazing Grace” was performed with a New Orleans jazz spin.
Biden has made dozens of visits to sites of violence, natural disaster and other calamities during his four years in office. With two weeks left in office, Monday’s visit to New Orleans could be his last such trip.
Biden often takes the opportunity at such bleak occasions to speak behind closed doors with the families, offer up his personal phone number in case people want to talk later on and talk about grief in stark, personal terms.
The attack
In New Orleans on Jan. 1, the driver plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who steered his speeding truck around a barricade and plowed into the crowd, later was fatally shot in a firefight with police.
Jabbar, an American citizen and Army veteran from Texas, had posted five videos on his Facebook account in the hours before the attack in which he proclaimed his support for the Islamic State militant group and previewed the violence that he would soon unleash in the French Quarter.
Biden on Sunday pushed back against conspiracy theories surrounding the attack, and he urged New Orleans residents to ignore them.
“I spent literally 17, 18 hours with the intelligence community from the time this happened to establish exactly what happened, to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that New Orleans was the act of a single man who acted alone,” he said. “All this talk about conspiracies with other people, there’s not evidence of that — zero.”
The youngest victim was 18 years old, and the oldest was 63. Most victims were in their 20s. They came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey and Great Britain.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, was asked on “Fox News Sunday” what the city was hoping for from Biden’s visit.
“How can we not feel for both the families of those who die but also those who’ve been injured in their families?” he asked.
“The best thing that the city, the state, and the federal government can do is do their best to make sure that this does not happen again. And what we can do as a people is to make sure that we don’t live our lives in fear or in terror — but live our lives bravely and with liberty, and then support those families however they need support.”