2025 New Orleans truck attack

• 1. Introduction

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  At about 3:15 in the morning on the 1st of January 2025, a white Ford F-150 Lightning pickup drove along Canal Street, got around a traffic barricade, and turned onto Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The 2025 New Orleans truck attack began there, in the middle of the city's New Year celebrations. It became the worst vehicle ramming attack in United States history, surpassing the 2017 New York City truck attack. Fourteen people died, along with the man at the wheel. Later that same day, the city was scheduled to host the Sugar Bowl, and revelers were still out on Bourbon Street. This documentary follows three questions. Why were the barriers meant to guard that street not in place? Who was the driver, and what led him there? And how did investigators decide whether he had acted alone?

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• 2. Barriers That Failed

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  Warnings had reached New Orleans before the holidays. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies had alerted local police agencies to the possibility of vehicle-ramming attacks. A 2017 city memo had already listed a mass casualty incident as a risk, including a vehicle attack in the French Quarter, and the city said it would raise security there. That same year, the city spent $250,000 on a set of 45 L-shaped temporary Archer barriers from Meridian Rapid Defense Group. Officials used them to protect that year's Mardi Gras parade from vehicle attacks.

  A 2019 assessment by Interfor International, prepared for the French Quarter Management District, raised another concern. Its authors wrote that the permanent bollards did "not appear to work". Looking at Bourbon Street, they also judged that "the two modes of terror attack likely to be used are vehicular ramming and active shooting".

  By the end of 2024, those bollards, which often malfunctioned, had been removed so they could be replaced before Super Bowl LIX on the 9th of February. The Sugar Bowl, due that night, was to pit the Georgia Bulldogs against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Police had added security for the celebrations, including drones over the French Quarter. American officials also feared lone attackers, and they were watching efforts by the Islamic State's Khorasan branch to recruit followers through online propaganda.

  The Archer barriers from 2017 were still the city's property, yet they were set out only after the attack was over. Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick did not learn that the city owned them until then.

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• 3. Three Blocks of Bourbon

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  Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick later said the driver was "trying to run over as many people as he possibly could". After leaving the flow of traffic, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar steered the truck onto the sidewalk to get around a police SUV and other barricades. Eyewitnesses said that steel barricades meant to block cars had not been raised. Kirkpatrick answered that police knew those barricades sometimes malfunctioned and had relied on other barricades instead.

  The truck ploughed through a three-block stretch between Canal and Conti streets. It finally crashed into an aerial work platform. Jabbar then climbed out and began firing a gun. At 3:17, two minutes after he turned onto the street, New Orleans police officers returned fire. They shot him four times in the torso, and he died. Two officers were wounded in the gunfight.

  Jabbar wore body armor. Police recovered a .308 AR-10 rifle and a Glock handgun. The truck had been rented through the app Turo. It was seen in Humble, Texas, on the morning before the attack, and later that day it was seen in Baytown, heading east on Interstate 10 toward New Orleans. It was registered to a man in Houston.

  The New Orleans police and Mayor LaToya Cantrell called the incident a terrorist attack. Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said that "driving a vehicle into a crowd is not particularly a thing that any law enforcement agency can be prepared for". Inside the truck, officers found an Islamic State flag.

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• 4. The Victims

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  By the 5th of January, the names of all fourteen people who died had been released. They were eleven men and three women, aged 18 to 63. Every one of them died of blunt force injuries. Two were from New Orleans: LaTasha Polk, 47, and Terrence Kennedy, 63. Six more lived elsewhere in Louisiana: Kareem Badawi, 18; Hubert Gauthreaux, 21; Reggie Hunter, 37; Nicole Perez, 27; Brandon Taylor, 43; and Elliot Wilkinson, 40.

  Martin "Tiger" Bech, 27, was a Louisiana native who lived in New York City. He was the brother of NFL player Jack Bech. Four others came from elsewhere in the United States: Andrew Dauphin, 26; Nikyra Dedeaux, 18; William DiMaio, 25; and Matthew Tenedorio, 25. The last was a British national, Edward Pettifer, 31, from Chelsea, London. He was the stepson of Alexandra "Tiggy" Pettifer, a former nanny to princes William and Harry.

  At least fifty-seven other people were hurt. Three people and the two police officers had been shot. Emergency crews took thirty of the wounded to five area hospitals, and others sought care on their own. Mexico's foreign ministry reported two Mexican nationals among the injured, and Israel's foreign ministry said the same of two Israeli citizens. The University of Georgia later confirmed that one of its students had been hurt.

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• 5. The Driver

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  Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar was born on the 26th of October 1982 in Beaumont, Texas, a city 85 miles east of Houston. He appeared on no federal watchlist. His family was African American and mostly attended the local Baptist church. His father, born in Houston, converted to Islam and changed the family name from Young to Jabbar, while his mother stayed Christian. His grandfather had moved from Louisiana to Texas in a migration of Creoles of color who came to the Beaumont area for work. Jabbar was raised a Christian but later converted, and his brother Abdur said he had been a "Muslim for most of his life."

  Jabbar's record before the attack was minor. He was arrested for misdemeanor theft in Katy in 2002 and for driving with an invalid license in 2005. In 2014, while serving at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he pleaded guilty to driving under the influence. He spent ten years in the United States Army as a human resources specialist and an information technology specialist. From February 2009 to January 2010 he was deployed to Afghanistan. He left active duty in 2015 as a staff sergeant with an honorable discharge and stayed in the Army Reserve until 2020.

  In 2015 he enrolled at Georgia State University, graduating in 2017 with a Bachelor of Business Administration in computer information systems. He partied and drank in college, which hurt his grades and cost him a scholarship. Friends noticed his growing interest in Islam but saw no signs of extremism.

  His personal life was unsteady. His first marriage ended in divorce in 2012. A second marriage ran from 2013 to 2016, and a third from 2017 to 2022. In 2021 he took a job at Deloitte as a "senior solutions specialist" in government and public services, earning $120,000 a year. A quarter of that went to alimony and child support. The husband of one ex-wife said Jabbar had grown unpredictable in the months before the attack, apparently driven by his religious views. The couple limited his contact with their children.

  In 2024 Jabbar moved to a Muslim community north of Houston and withdrew from others. He began posting recordings to SoundCloud that preached conservative religious views. He called music a gateway "into the things that God had made forbidden to us", such as alcohol and marijuana. In an early 2024 recording, he said that "the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad's followers … is a sign of the end times." He was not seen at either of two nearby mosques. He also did not belong to any of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston's 21 congregations.

  What pushed him toward violence remains unclear. Investigators said his views became far more extreme after the Gaza war began in 2023. In late June of that year he traveled alone to Cairo, Egypt, and spent eleven days there. In mid-July he stayed three days in Ontario. U.S. investigators are still probing what he did on those trips.

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• 6. The Final Hours

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  On the 30th of December 2024, Jabbar rented a Ford F-150 Lightning pickup in Houston. The next day he bought a cooler at a store in Texas, one of two he would use to hold homemade bombs. He began driving east that morning and reached Louisiana at 2:30 in the afternoon. At 9:00 that night his truck was spotted in Gonzales, Louisiana. At 10:00 he unloaded it in front of his rental house in New Orleans.

  At 12:41 in the morning, after parking the truck, he walked to the corner of Royal and Governor Nichols streets. Between 1:29 and 3:02 he posted five videos to Facebook, along with a final will and testament. In them he pledged allegiance, known as bay'at, to ISIS. He said he wanted his act to highlight the "war between the believers and the disbelievers". He also said he had considered holding a family "celebration" where relatives would "witness the killing of the apostates." Videos he recorded while driving from Texas also touched on his divorce and a wish to kill his family.

  Between the videos, he placed explosives. At 1:53 he left the first improvised device in a cooler on Bourbon Street near St. Peter Street. He went back to the truck for the second, which was in a different type of cooler. At 2:20 he planted it at Bourbon and Toulouse streets. Both spots lay in the French Quarter, and investigators would soon find both coolers.

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• 7. The Investigation

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  The two pipe bombs sat inside coolers a few blocks from the truck's path, rigged to a wireless remote that was found in the truck. They held nails, screws and tacks as shrapnel and were made with RDX. Because Jabbar skipped using a detonator, relying on an electric match, the FBI called the devices "crude" and said they showed a "lack of experience". Investigators also found a handgun and a long gun fitted with a homemade suppressor. The ATF concluded that the rifle had been bought legally from a person in Arlington, Texas, on the 19th of November 2024. The origin of the handgun was still under investigation.

  Early on, police thought they saw accomplices. Surveillance video showed several people standing near the suspected explosives. After further review, investigators concluded that Jabbar had planted the bombs himself and that the onlookers had no connection to him "in any way". On the 4th of January, a deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division said investigators "do not assess at this point that anyone else is involved in this attack except Shamsud-Din Jabbar." The FBI said he was "100% inspired by ISIS" and that the attack was premeditated. It found no sign of direct contact or direction from the group, so it handled the case as domestic terrorism. Investigators noted that this self-radicalization fits a pattern from earlier jihadist attacks.

  A fire broke out shortly after 5 a.m. at an Airbnb in the St. Roch neighborhood that investigators believe Jabbar rented. The ATF believes he lit a small fire in a hallway and left accelerants in several rooms to destroy evidence. The fire burned itself out before reaching them, and firefighters put it out. That allowed investigators to seize explosive-making materials. On the 3rd of January, the FBI raided his home in Houston and took more such material. A man surrendered during the raid, but the FBI later said no arrests were made. The agency also reported that Jabbar wore Meta smart glasses when he began the attack, though he did not record it or try to livestream it.

  At 8:39 that morning, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas in Paradise, Nevada. The blast killed its driver and injured seven others. That man had also rented his vehicle through Turo, and both men reportedly served at the same military base. The FBI said there was "no definitive link" between the two events. On the 9th of January, the Islamic State's weekly newsletter Al-Naba, in its 477th issue, praised the attack and Jabbar himself and urged other supporters to follow him.

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• 8. Reactions and Aftermath

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  The Sugar Bowl, set for 7:45 that evening, was pushed to 3 p.m. on the 2nd of January because security sweeps were still under way. Many hotels in the area were evacuated, and hospitality workers arriving for their shifts were turned away. A reunification center for families opened at University Medical Center New Orleans. Crews cleaned Bourbon Street from 2:00 to 8:00 on the morning of the 2nd, and it reopened to pedestrians at around 1:00 that afternoon. At the game, a moment of silence came before kickoff. After the national anthem, the crowd chanted "U-S-A!"

  In Louisiana, anger focused on the missing barriers. Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser blasted the city on the 3rd of January for "a complete failure of responsibility to keep the city safe, from the top down". Superintendent Kirkpatrick refused to assign blame when a journalist asked whether she was upset. French Quarter workers questioned why permanent bollards were replaced in winter, the district's busiest season. Within days, unknown people had scrawled "USE ME" and "DO NOT HIDE ME" on the Archer barriers. Peter Whitford, chief executive of Meridian Rapid Defense Group, flew in to help and told The Guardian, "We're here to help New Orleans get to the standard that it needs to get to". A rented Archer barrier had stopped a woman from driving into the 2024 Rose Parade in Pasadena, where a moment of silence was now held.

  Governor Jeff Landry drew criticism for a photo of himself smiling and giving a thumbs-up outside a steakhouse. He captioned it, "Ate dinner tonight in New Orleans. Proud to be a part of this incredibly resilient city. See everyone at the game tomorrow!" He defended it by saying Louisiana "does not cower to radical Islamic terrorists." President Joe Biden called Mayor Cantrell and said his "heart goes out to the victims and their families who were simply trying to celebrate the holiday". Then-president-elect Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise also condemned the attack. Governments from France to China sent condolences, and Pope Francis offered prayers. King Charles III, William and Catherine singled out the death of Edward Pettifer.

  Jabbar's brother Abdur told reporters that the FBI asked him why it happened, and he had no answer. "That's not the brother I know," he said. The Islamic Society of Greater Houston said it was "horrified by the senseless crime targeting civilians". A small private funeral for Jabbar was held in Houston on the 2nd of February 2025. The NFL and the Saints gave $1 million to help victims' families. When Super Bowl LIX came to New Orleans, the victims and first responders were honored before kickoff, and members of the Bech and Tenedorio families flipped the ceremonial coin.

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