Biden is traveling to New Orleans following the French Quarter attack that killed 14 and injured 30
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden takes a message to the grieving families of the victims on the deadly New Year’s attack in New Orleans: “It takes time. You have to persevere.”
Biden on Monday will visit the city where an Army veteran drove a truck into partygoers in the French Quarter, killing 14 people and injuring 30. It is likely the last time Biden as president will travel to the scene of a horrific crime to comfort families of victims. He has less than two weeks left to remain in office.
It’s a grim task that presidents undertake, though not every leader has embraced the role with as much intimacy as 82-year-old Biden, who has experienced many personal tragedies in his own life. His first wife and daughter died in a car accident in the early 1970s, and his eldest son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.
‘I’ve been there. There’s nothing you can really say to someone who has just suffered such a tragic loss,” Biden told reporters on Sunday in a preview of his visit. “My message will be personal if I can get it alone.”
Biden often takes the opportunity on such somber occasions to talk to the families behind closed doors, to give his personal phone number in case people want to talk later, and to talk about grief in stark, personal terms.
The Democratic president will travel to California after his stop in New Orleans. The White House even continued planning for the trip a snowstorm hit the Washington region.
In New Orleans, the driver drove into a crowd on the city’s famous Bourbon Street. Fourteen party goers were killed along with the driver. Shamsud-Din Jabbarwho steered his speeding truck around a barricade and plowed into the crowd, was later fatally shot during a shootout with police.
Jabbar, an American citizen from Texashad posted five videos to his Facebook account in the hours before the attack, expressing support for the Islamic State militant group and previewing the violence he would soon unleash in the French Quarter.
Biden on Sunday pushed back against conspiracy theories surrounding the attack, urging New Orleans residents to ignore them.
“I literally spent 17, 18 hours with the intelligence community from the moment this happened to determine exactly what happened, to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that New Orleans was the act of a single man acting alone,” he said. “All this talk about conspiracies with other people, there’s no evidence for that – zero.”
The youngest victim was 18 years old and the oldest was 63 years old. Most of the victims were in their twenties. They came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey and Great Britain.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, was asked on Fox News Channel what the city hoped to get from Biden’s visit.
“How can we not sympathize with the families of those who die, but also with those who have been injured in their families?” he asked.
“The best thing the city, state and federal government can do is do their best to ensure this doesn’t happen again. And what we can do as a people is make sure that we don’t live our lives in fear or terror – but live our lives courageously and in freedom, and then support those families in the way that they need support.”
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Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.