As New Orleans officials deployed to protect thousands of revellers they knew would flock to the city’s famed French Quarter on New Year’s Eve, they parked a police SUV to block the main entrance to Bourbon Street, a packed pedestrian thoroughfare long seen as vulnerable to a vehicular-ramming attack.
But the SUV left a large gap. That allowed the driver of a pickup truck to turn onto Bourbon Street hours after midnight, video shows, in the first moments of a deadly Islamic State-inspired rampage. It was not a momentary security lapse: At various times earlier that evening, the gap between the police SUV and the nearest structural obstacle was more than twice the width of the attacker’s truck, a Washington Post examination of visual evidence found.
A short distance down the block, the truck drove over a hydraulic metal barrier that officials had planned to raise that night to prevent unauthorized vehicles from driving down Bourbon Street, according to a New Year’s Eve road closure plan obtained by The Post. The barrier was left down.
Beyond that point, there were no anti-vehicle barricades or police vehicles blocking the path of the truck that night, according to eyewitnesses and video footage reviewed by The Post. The driver sped virtually unimpeded for almost 1,000 feet, plowing through a crowd of people until he struck a piece of construction equipment that happened to be there for a project unrelated to security, according to photographs, videos and witness accounts.
Fourteen people were killed and dozens injured.
Police have previously acknowledged that the driver managed to bypass security safeguards that had been put in place – with one official saying they had a plan and yet “the terrorist defeated it.”
But The Post’s block-by-block accounting of events on New Year’s Eve and into the next morning found major security lapses and shortcomings in the city’s street-closure plan. Among the findings, the hydraulic metal barricade that was not raised was the only anti-vehicle barrier planned on Bourbon Street itself.
“There were a number of ways to successfully protect this street from a ramming attack, and it appears that none of them were used,” security expert Don Aviv said after reviewing The Post’s findings. Aviv is chief executive of Interfor International, a company commissioned by the French Quarter Management District to study security measures in the area in 2019.
The FBI had warned New Orleans officials years earlier that Bourbon Street was vulnerable. The mayor at the time pushed to bolster public-safety infrastructure after a deadly 2016 vehicle-ramming attack in Nice, France, that helped prompt cities around the world to rethink their security.
The following year, parts of the stretch where the New Year’s attack would occur were among several blocks specified in a city report as areas in need of hardened infrastructure to reduce the risk of terrorists using vehicles to ram pedestrians.
The 2017 report, commissioned by the city’s Public Works Department, noted that “portable police barricades” often used to close the street to most vehicles on evenings and holidays and for special events provided “a low level of security” because they were easy for people to move aside.
“Would be vehicle borne attackers could just as easily move – or drive straight through – these barricades,” the report said.
That year, officials announced a $40 million public safety project that included the installation of metal posts known as bollards that could slide on tracks into the middle of Bourbon Street to temporarily block vehicles at critical points near each cross street. However, Mardi Gras beads and other debris jammed the mechanisms, rendering the system unusable, officials said.
The approach to closing Bourbon Street has always been inconsistent, local residents and workers said, and Interfor International’s 2019 report found that security in the French Quarter was handled in a “patchwork manner” and hindered by “improper or insufficient coordination, cohesion and proper deployment.”
Security vulnerabilities were on display on Halloween last year when, according to the FBI, the Texas man who would later attack Bourbon Street visited New Orleans and recorded video as he biked through the French Quarter. Later that evening, as partyers crowded the area, no police vehicles or significant barriers were blocking the entrance onto Bourbon Street from Canal Street, according to video footage posted by one local YouTuber. The old bollards appeared battered and weren’t used.
On New Year’s Eve, the city was in the process of tearing out the old bollards and replacing them with a different bollard system, one that authorities say was not yet functional. Police officials later said they had accounted for that with strategically placed barriers, officers and police vehicles.
“We did indeed harden those target areas,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told reporters at a news conference on New Year’s Day.
Police officers were patrolling at the time of the attack, and portable crowd-control fences that resembled bike racks were placed along parts of the street, according to video footage and witnesses, who said they saw nothing that would stop a vehicle.
Representatives for the mayor, the Police Department and the Public Works Department did not answer detailed questions for this article. The Police Department has enlisted William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner, to review the city’s security plans and vulnerability to attacks.
Despite the police presence, the attack unfolded in an instant on New Year’s. Witnesses said that because it was an electric vehicle, the truck accelerated quickly and almost silently down Bourbon Street, the most audible warnings of its advance the sound of it striking people and the screams it left behind.
Just after 3:15 a.m., pedicab operator Tyler Burt was stopped beside the police SUV that was supposed to be blocking Bourbon Street at its intersection with Canal Street. He saw a white Ford F150 Lightning drive around the police SUV and strike members of the family he had just dropped off.
“My customers might have been the first people that were hit,” Burt said. The truck drove over the sidewalk to turn onto Bourbon Street, police have said. Burt looked down the street, following the truck’s progress. “I saw bodies flying in the air,” he said, “and I realized then that this was intentional.”
At two separate times in the hours before the attack, the police SUV’s position left a gap of at least 14 feet – twice the width of the seven-foot-wide Lightning – between its front bumper and the nearest obstruction, according to The Post’s examination of visual evidence.
The Post determined the distance between the SUV and the nearest structure – a traffic light – based on video at 7:26 p.m. and 10:58 p.m. using satellite and on-the-ground measurements. Between those two times, the vehicle moved at least once for a reason that could not be determined, and its precise location at the time of the attack, about four hours after the 10:58 p.m. video, could not be determined.
Eurico Cosme Neto, 22, was standing with friends at a streetcar stop in the middle of Canal Street when the white pickup pulled up behind them. He watched as the attacker’s truck pulled past the police vehicle at the intersection, easily veering from Canal onto Bourbon. “The truck had enough space to turn,” Neto said. “They had plenty of space if the goal was to go over people.”
Had the police SUV been parked farther into Bourbon Street, where two rows of new bollards are being installed, it would have blocked access to the narrow road more effectively, according to The Post’s examination of video and measurements taken at the scene.
The placement of the police vehicle was “poorly chosen and clearly insufficient to stop most vehicular-ramming attacks,” and city officials should have used other barriers to close the gap, said Aviv, the security expert.
The city acquired temporary anti-vehicle barriers known as “archers” after the 2016 attack in France, but did not use them on New Year’s Eve. Kirkpatrick said on Jan. 2 that she hadn’t been aware until after the attack that the city owned the mobile yellow barriers.
Once the truck was on Bourbon Street, it almost immediately reached the inactive hydraulic “wedge,” a type of anti-vehicle barrier that can be opened or closed.
People who have worked on Bourbon Street for years, including a captain with New Orleans Fire Department, told The Post the device is often raised to secure the road during holidays and other big events.
Officials had indicated the wedge would be deployed to close the street to vehicles between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m., according to the previously unreported city document, a street-closure plan circulated within the Fire Department in preparation for New Year’s Eve. Three city officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a plan that has not been released publicly, said the wedge’s appearance on the street-closure document meant it was supposed to be raised during those hours.
At the New Year’s Day news conference, Kirkpatrick said the city’s wedges had “malfunction problems” and were left down in case emergency vehicles needed to pass. It is unclear what those problems were. Another official said the police vehicle at Canal had been “strategically placed” in front of the nonfunctioning wedge to prevent access to Bourbon.
“If the wedge barrier was in place and properly deployed, this story is radically different,” Rob Reiter, an expert on protecting against vehicular-ramming attacks, wrote in an email to The Post.
Had the steel wedge been raised, it would have blocked the truck’s passage through the street, leaving open just one sidewalk that was barely wider than the truck itself and partially obstructed with trash receptacles that night, according to The Post’s examination of video and measurements taken at the scene.
As it was, the wedge acted as little more than a speed bump as the electric truck raced down the middle of Bourbon Street, according to video footage as well as the pedicab operator and another witness, Braedon Cato, who also saw the truck hit people at the corner of Canal and Bourbon.
“All I heard was the bodies hitting the truck and then, like, him zooming by. And then I heard the wind rush with him,” said Cato, who described the truck barely missing a woman standing near him.
He said he didn’t think the truck hit anyone else until it reached the next intersection, at Iberville Street, where it passed over freshly laid placements for new bollards. Video from earlier that evening shows police had put two of the portable bike-rack-style fences there.
The truck slowed briefly at the intersection before plowing on, video shows.
No anti-vehicle barriers were planned on Bourbon Street for the intersections with Iberville, Bienville or any of the subsequent cross streets on New Year’s Eve, according to the Fire Department document. The document says flood lights were to be placed in each block along that stretch.
A number of side streets were to be closed off, preventing access to Bourbon Street, the plan shows. Witnesses said they saw police cars blocking access from at least one side street.
One of the fences along Bourbon Street lodged under the attacker’s truck but did nothing to slow the vehicle’s progress, according to Rayan Sirbil, a pedicab operator who was standing off to the side at the intersection at Bienville and Bourbon streets as the truck passed.
Sirbil said it was the sound of the metal fence grinding against the road that first alerted him to the oncoming vehicle – that, he said, and the screams of the people left in its wake.
In shock, Sirbil said he radioed his fellow pedicab operators, yelling, “There is somebody killing everybody on the streets. Run away from Bourbon!” The truck whipped through the intersection and crashed seconds later.
The truck had slammed into the back of a cherry picker parked on Bourbon Street between Bienville and Conti streets. The lift was being used in a building renovation project on the street, according to a video provided to The Post by Clark Thompson, a local vlogger who filmed the lift in action in mid-December.
“An idle piece of construction equipment slowed the terrorist attack when all the countermeasures came up short,” Thompson said.
It is not clear how far the truck might otherwise have traveled. Video from earlier in the evening along the next three blocks of Bourbon Street showed no substantial physical barriers placed to block the road.
Following the crash, two officers were injured in a gunfight with the assailant, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, and he was killed. Authorities later said he was a U.S. military veteran who had planted two explosive devices in the French Quarter hours earlier. They did not detonate.
New Orleans City Council member J.P. Morrell said he doesn’t understand why there weren’t more measures in place to harden the key places along Bourbon Street – especially those that were once identified as critical choke points to prevent such an attack.
“If you look at the vehicle that travelled along Bourbon Street, it basically was an uninterrupted drive down Bourbon Street for three blocks until it hit that piece of equipment,” Morrell said.