The Daily - Terror in New Orleans

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of violence and death.A mere three hours into 2025, terrorism struck in downtown New Orleans.The Times journalists Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mike Baker, and Christina Morales discuss what we know about the attack, the man who carried it out and the victims.Guests: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, a reporter at The New York Times covering criminal justice.Mike Baker, a national reporter for The New York Times.Christina Morales, a reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The attack left 15 dead and about three dozen injured, and followed a distressingly familiar pattern of assailants turning vehicles into weapons.The man identified as the suspect served in the U.S. military, worked at Deloitte and grew increasingly devout.The attacker most likely acted alone, officials said.Who were the people killed in the attack?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. A mere three hours into 2025, terrorism struck in downtown New Orleans. Today, what we know about the attack, the man who carried it out, and the victims. I spoke with my colleagues Nicholas Bogol-Peros, Mike Baker, and Christina Morales. It's Friday, January 3rd. third. Lauren and Meg, we're just out here dancing through life, enjoying the final hours of 2024. There are thousands that have chosen...

Nick, I wonder if you can set the scene for us in the French Quarter of New Orleans on New Year's Eve. Yeah, this is a New Year's Eve in New Orleans. It's a place where thousands of people come every year to celebrate the new year, to drink all night, to be with their friends, to stay out late, to roam around the streets and go from bar to bar. And that's exactly what people were doing this New Year's Eve, like every year. And at the heart of the French Quarter is Bourbon Street. And it is one of the most famous streets in New Orleans, if not the country. And even at 3am,

especially on New Year's Day, New Year's Eve, there are people on the sidewalks under these neon signs getting an Uber or figuring out their next move. And then around 315, all of that changes. It was at that time that a white pickup truck was driving to this area. Normally in this area there are these metal barricades or bollards. In this case there's a lot of questions about whether those were missing because the city has undertaken this renovation process of the bollards. What we know is that what was blocking the street was a police car that the truck was able to speed around by seemingly going up onto the sidewalk where there was a big group of people and then started accelerating down Bourbon Street extremely fast.

The guy in the pickup truck just punched the ass and mowed over the barricade. We have captured the people that died by this bar. There's people pulling each other out of the way, jumping out of the way at the last minute, people looking at their phones, and then suddenly looking up at this loud noise and having maybe half a second to save their lives. And after barreling through crowds of people,

this truck eventually comes to a stop, and a police officer approaches the driver's side, and there's seemingly an exchange of gunfire in which we know that the attacker was killed. I turned to look down the street and there's just bodies littered throughout the entire street. And the screams, I mean, you can't think about, you know, unhear that. And at that point, it's just mayhem on the street with people trying to find loved ones, checking on each other.

There are bodies all over, people described going into bars trying to hide, just trying to figure out what's happened and see if their friends have made it with them to safety. And it's a devastating scene of carnage on Bourbon Street, where just moments before, it had been the opposite. It had been revelry and people going into the new year. You know, at 1.30 in the morning, I was throwing beads off the balcony, trying to continue ringing in the fun of the new year. And so to come out of the balcony

and immediately see dead bodies on the ground was jarring. And in the end 14 people were killed in this attack and 35 more people were wounded. You are watching MSNBC's special coverage of a deadly New Year's attack in New Orleans. At least 15 dead and dozens injured. The FBI says they're investigating this as a potential act of terrorism. By the morning we learned that this was quite clearly an intentional attack. We learned that the truck had an ISIS flag on the back of it. We learned that the attacker had driven from Texas to New Orleans to carry out this mayhem. And we learned his name, Shamsuddin Bihar Jabbar, a 42-year-old US Army veteran from Texas who had, just in the hours before the attack,

posted videos on his Facebook in which he apparently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. But the question at that point is, was he working with someone else? Were there other people involved? And the police had found these coolers that contained explosive devices. One was right on the corner of Bourbon Street and one was two blocks away. And when they looked at surveillance video, they saw a bunch of people standing around them, people checking them out, looking at them. And they wondered if any of those people might have been involved in this attack. So that sets off this hunt essentially for people

that they thought might have planted explosive devices in the area that thankfully did not go off. And there's a lot of confusion about whether more people are out there who were part of this attack. Tonight, one person is dead and seven others injured after a 2024 Cybertruck exploded. At the same time, also on New Year's Day, you have these wild videos of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas across the country bursting into flames right outside of a Trump-branded hotel.

What do you make of the pair of attacks? You got two rented pickup trucks in two different cities this morning. Coincidence, or you think this is linked? And so I think for a lot of people, there was this question of whether there was a coordinated attack across the country and fears of what might happen next. Right. That was the feeling by the end of New Year's Day. I felt it.

That there was the distinct possibility from what the police were raising that there was a coordinated multi-location attack happening. I think that's right. Exactly. And part of the reason I think people thought these attacks might be connected in New Orleans and Las Vegas is because the drivers of both cars had apparently rented them through this fairly obscure car rental company called Turo where people rent out their personal vehicles to others. And so, you know, I think people were coming up with all kinds of theories about whether

this was an attack that had been planned, that people had coordinated in choosing a certain rental service or doing this or that and that more attacks could be coming. Then on Thursday morning... We do not assess at this point that anyone else is involved in this attack except for Shamsa Din Jabbar. The FBI and other officials come out and say definitively that they are quite confident that the attacker in New Orleans was acting alone, that he apparently did not have any help.

Those reports turned out to be misinformation or not actual... And what we end up finding out is that the people who were standing around those coolers with the explosive devices were just bystanders, just people taking a look at something on the street and that they apparently had no involvement in placing them there or knowing what was inside. They said that they do have the attacker on video planting those coolers with the explosive devices. All the resources of the FBI are being focused on tracking down every piece of evidence, every lead, every interview. The FBI said that they've recovered three phones tied to the attacker, that they're also going through two computers that they recovered, they are executing search warrants, they are combing

through a bunch of tips and surveillance video, and they also asked anyone who had interacted with him in the last few days to come forward. And now the question has turned to how this man who was a US Army veteran and had a stable job had ended up becoming radicalized and pledging allegiance to ISIS and wanting to carry out as much destruction as possible in the heart of New Orleans. After the break, my colleague, national reporter Mike Baker, on what we've learned about the suspect. We'll be right back.

Mike, now that we understand from authorities that the suspect acted alone, what are we learning about his specific motivations and how it is that he goes from serving in the US Army, in theory protecting America, to becoming a supporter of ISIS who seems bent on killing Americans? Yeah, we spent a lot of our time the last two days tracing his life, trying to get to the bottom of that switch. Jabbar grows up in Texas. He's raised a Christian, at some point converts to Islam. He goes off to the army.

He deploys to Afghanistan as part of the war on terror. He earns a global war on terrorism service medal. In the military, he's doing HR work and IT work. And then as he transitions out of the army, he puts those skills to use. He goes to Georgia State, he gets a bachelor's degree in computer information systems. Then he goes back to Texas, works in real estate. And he actually posts a YouTube video at one point. Good evening. I'm Shamsuddin Jaboor, property manager with Blue Metal Properties and Team

Lead. Where he's talking about his real estate business and he really, you can see him projecting a self-confidence. I've been here all my life with the exception of traveling for the military where I spent 10 years as a human resources specialist and IT specialist where I learned the meaning of great service and what it means to be responsive. That he has picked up skills in the military that are helping him now today. So once we get to the closing table, all the I's are going to be dotted.

All the T's are going to be crossed. Everything's going to go off without a hitch. And that tech savviness he shows, you know, ultimately he lands himself a six-figure job at Deloitte, a really prominent consulting firm. So in the middle of all this, the people around him, his friends, his family, they're seeing a guy who's living a normal and frankly successful life. You know, former schoolmate talks about him as being the quiet and studious type. You know, a former neighbor we talked to said he was the kind of guy who would always refer to her as ma'am.

He'd say, ma'am, hey, do you want some help with that? Can I help you bring in your groceries? Even his brother that we talked to, his brother spoke to Jabbar just a couple weeks ago and saw no inkling that there were any problems, that he was on a path to do something so horrific. And even at that consulting job that he had, someone sent me a copy of his out of office reply that was still active as of yesterday.

And he says he's out of town. Please expect a delay in response during this time. That's what he wrote. If the matter is time sensitive, please call or text me. That was the last message he had left there at his consulting job. or text me. That was the last message he had left there at his consulting job. Well, clearly, behind this external image of success, you're describing something very dark is brewing. And I wonder what you're finding about that. Yeah, we can see that, sort of, behind this life of success that he was having, there

were also some struggles. He had gone through two divorces. In the middle of the second one, at the start of 2022, he wrote an email to his wife's lawyer describing some financial troubles. He wrote, I cannot afford the house payment, describing past due payments over $27,000, danger of foreclosure. So he lays out there also some difficulties

in his own work in real estate. Then more recently, some of the people who knew him described him as becoming erratic. We spoke to the husband of his first ex-wife and he said they had grown so concerned about his behavior that they had decided to limit the contact he was having with his two daughters. Hmm. So his first wife and her new husband think that he's now a danger to his daughters. Do we know why they conclude that? We don't know exactly, but they felt like his behavior was becoming more unpredictable and a little bit frightening and suggested

it had something to do with his religious beliefs growing more fervent. And what evidence do we have that his religious beliefs do grow more fervent? Well, the FBI in a press conference has now released more details on that question. They describe videos that Jabbar posted in the hours right before the New Orleans attack. They say he posted five videos and in one of them, he describes how

he joined ISIS before last summer, that he talked about initially having the idea of harming his own family and friends, but he worried that taking an action like that would result in news coverage that would not focus on what he said was, quote, the war between the believers and the disbelievers. And you know, what's extraordinary about these videos is he starts posting them at 1 29 a.m. on the day of the attack and post the last one a little after 3 a.m., just minutes before the attack begins. And in one of them, he provided what the FBI described as a will and testament, suggesting

that he knew he was headed to a situation where he was going to die. Like, there was this period when attacks by people who said they had been inspired by ISIS, who claimed they had joined ISIS, became terrifyingly familiar all over the world within the past decade. And in some of those cases, the people who carried out the attacks were in direct communication with ISIS, often online. They were communicating with them, in some cases taking guidance from them. But in other cases, it seemed to be a process of self-radicalization. People who had watched ISIS videos, read the propaganda, and then decided to act on their own.

That was the case with the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. That seemed to be the case with the last major ISIS-inspired attack in the US, which was in 2017 in New York by a man who claimed loyalty to ISIS before he drove a truck along the West Side and killed a bunch of people. Do we have any sense in this case of which version we're talking about? What this man's relationship to ISIS actually was. That's one of my big lingering questions. Investigators are searching certainly for that level

of coordination or communication, but haven't disclosed any at this point. We've been doing our own searching on through his really deep history on the internet and have yet to find any direct connections between himself and ISIS operatives. But that's certainly an open question. How did he get onto this path

that he described now in these videos? Mm-hmm. So in the end, we don't really know if this is about ISIS or an unstable person latching onto the idea of ISIS as a rationale. Yeah, there are still a lot of questions to be answered here. The thing I can't get out of my head is something you said earlier, Mike, about how when Jabbar

was in the military, he'd been given an award for participating in the war on terrorism. And now here we have the same person all these years later participating in an act of terrorism. And that's just really hard to wrap your head around. Yeah, it is. You know, I, to your point, one of the things that has stood out to me this week was a photo that was posted in 2013 by the 82nd Airborne Division where Jabbar was serving at the time. You know, it's a photo of him sitting in front of a laptop doing his IT work for the military. And there in the comments under the photo, his mom, she writes in there how proud they are of him. And she expresses thanks to all the people who are serving in the military,

protecting the country. And now that family is trying to make sense of what happened this week. How Jabbar had gone from someone who was protecting Americans to someone who has now murdered Americans. On Thursday afternoon, a fuller picture emerged of the 14 victims of Wednesday's attack who had come to Bourbon Street to celebrate the year that was and the year to come. They included a single mother who had just gotten a promotion at work, a 26-year-old attending a bluegrass concert with his younger brother, and a recent high school graduate whose family members spoke with my colleague, Christina Morales. with my colleague, Christina Morales. So, Nikaira Cheyenne Dodeau was 18 years old from Gulfport, Mississippi.

To her close family and friends, she was known as Biscuit because her grandmother, Jennifer Smith, used to make her biscuits as a child and she used to love to eat them. And she used to call her my Biscuit. So among her close family and friends that was her nickname. She was very close to her family. She had five siblings. She was like probably one of the favorite grandchildren of this entire family. The proudest moment of her grandmother's life for sure was during her graduation in May. They had a party right before the actual ceremony where her mother made bouquets of money and that they had given to her and then they all got dressed.

She got dressed in her like red cap and gown and all her family went in t-shirts with her face on it. Like even the babies of the family went in one with her face on it. So the idea was that she would look out into the crowd on her graduation day and see every member of her family wearing a t-shirt bearing her face. Mm-hm. Well, what's the story of how she ends up on Bourbon Street on New Year's Day around 3 a.m.?

Yeah, so that was a surprise to her family and even some of her close friends as she was in New Orleans at all. When I spoke to her family yesterday, they had no idea that she had been there. And they said that if they had known that she was planning on it, that they would have convinced her otherwise. Why? Because her grandmother in particular talked about how she has always worried about these sorts of attacks, mass shootings, etc. on holidays. So she said that she would have convinced her otherwise to not go.

And Christina, what did the family tell you about their reaction to that information? That their daughter or their granddaughter, someone they didn't even know was in New Orleans, was there and had been one of the victims of this terror attack? Her grandmother told me that everyone is devastated. Her grandmother has 17 grandchildren. This is the first time she's lost a grandchild. What's particularly painful for the family to know was that in a few weeks, she was getting ready to start a new phase in her life,

going to school at Blue Cliff College, majoring in nursing. She was supposed to follow in the footsteps of her mother and her grandmother, who were both nurses. One of the most poignant things that her grandmother told me in our conversation yesterday was that Nikira was a joy for the little time that they had had her. And yesterday they were really struggling, saying that it was hard to believe that she was gone. Well, Christina, thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. On Thursday night, the Times reported that a security assessment prepared in 2019, warned New Orleans officials that Bourbon Street

was vulnerable to a terrorist attack involving a vehicle, and that the existing system in place to prevent such an attack, quote, does not appear to work. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, police offered new details about the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in front of a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year's Day. They said that the driver of the truck, an active member of the U.S. military, had died

by suicide before the truck exploded. Inside of the rented truck, police said, they found multiple guns, fuel and fireworks, which had ignited during the incident. But they said that the soldier's motives remained unclear. soldiers' motives remained unclear. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tam, Shannon Lin, Diana Nguyen, and Mujzadeh. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Leah Shaw-Dameron, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Chelsea Daniel, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsferk of Wonderville.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.