New Orleans, Louisiana – It was 3am on New Year’s Day, and Tyler Burt, a pedicab driver working in New Orleans’s historic French Quarter, decided to take one last fare.
He pedalled to Bourbon Street, a busy pedestrian thoroughfare pulsing with music and laughter. It wasn’t long before a family of four flagged him down.
The two daughters in the group were wearing high heels, and their feet ached from walking. So they climbed aboard the carriage latched to the back of Burt’s bicycle, and he cycled them to the corner of Bourbon and Canal, their parents following behind on foot.
Every little movement from then on would shape the rest of their lives.
Burt remembers one girl dug through her purse, frowning. “Can you wait for my parents?” she asked, polite but tired. “They have my phone.”
They chatted on the sidewalk amid the night’s debris: mudded-over confetti, cracked neon-green cocktail cups. A police car was stationed at the end of the street a few yards away, separating the party-goers from nearby traffic.
The parents soon walked up and paid Burt. It was 3:16am. Burt wished the family a happy new year, and he and the dad exchanged a high five.
“He was standing right in front of me, [close] enough for me to touch him,” Burt recalls. “As we were high-fiving, we turned to the left, and this big white truck veered around the police vehicle.”
It was a Ford F-150 Lightning pick-up truck — weighing upwards of 2.7 tonnes (6,015 pounds) — careening down the street straight towards them. Burt tried to get out of the truck’s way, but his own bicycle blocked his path; he could only watch.
“First, it ran over his wife. And then it ran him over in front of me,” Burt says. It passed so close that, when Burt reached out towards the dad, the speeding truck grazed his hand, leaving behind a blood blister.
He watched the truck speed two more blocks down Bourbon Street, smashing into revellers. When he turned back, the two daughters were kneeling around their mom, trying to shake her awake, screaming.
An unsettling clarity descended upon Burt in the minutes that followed, and he felt as if he had never been so alert in his life.
Burt remembers every detail: the bloody gash on the unconscious father’s brow, the screams of a fellow pedicab worker. She would later tell him that she saw the driver’s face as the truck swept past.
In the hours afterwards, law enforcement announced the car-ramming was no accident. It was a planned attack, culminating in a shootout between police and the driver, Texas-born veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who died at the scene.
United States officials have called it an act of terror. Two improvised explosives were discovered nearby, and a flag for the armed group ISIL (ISIS) was found tied to the back of Jabbar’s truck hitch.
A total of 14 victims died that day. Another 57 were injured. The family Burt had escorted down Bourbon Street were among those who miraculously survived.
But within 36 hours, the crime scene was cleared, and crowds returned to Bourbon Street. Tourists sipped from oversized beers and stumbled past improvised memorials: wooden crosses with candles and flowers heaped on the pavement.
“We’re going to put it all behind us,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry told a news conference on January 2. The night before, he had called New Orleans a “resilient city” while sharing a photo of himself at a luxury steakhouse, just a few blocks from the crime scene.
In the wake of mass violence, public discourse often emphasises the importance of quickly returning to normalcy.
The aim is to defuse the disruptive aims of the attackers. But experts warn that kind of push can leave some survivors struggling without adequate support.
“Recovery takes a really long time from these types of collective traumas. We can’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s gone. We’re OK,’” said Tara Powell, a professor who researches behavioural health during disasters at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
