In the first hours of 2025, a terrorist attack occurred on Bourbon St. in New Orleans, La. that took the lives of 15 individuals and injured many others. Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a truck into a crowd that was innocently celebrating the new year. The city was hosting thousands of visitors at the time for its New Year’s Eve celebration and the second round of the college football playoff at the Allstate Sugar Bowl. Along with travelers from around the country, multiple Oxford residents and students were also in the city.
“We didn’t really know what was going on at first,” former OHS student Jack Berry said. “We never saw the truck, but we saw a few people who had been hit. There was a lot of chaos. At around 6 a.m. the next day, we heard it was a terrorist attack, and that was a pretty surreal moment.”
The attack sent terror across the entire city, as many feared the attack on New Orleans was not over. The FBI quickly took control of the investigation and discovered plans for additional attacks on the city. Surveillance footage showed Jabbar hiding two explosive devices in coolers on Bourbon St. and storing other bomb-making materials in his home.
“We woke up the next morning, checked our phones to see what had really happened, and saw that police had found other bombs hidden in the city,” OHS alumnus Capp Anderson said. “All we wanted to do was pack up and get out of town.”
In the hours and days following the attack, the safety of the people in New Orleans became the top priority. Security lined the streets and surrounded buildings across the city.
“I remember a huge police presence in my hotel and around the block the morning after,” former OHS student Henry Hyneman said. “The airport was one of the most heavily guarded places I had ever encountered.”
The Sugar Bowl was postponed from Jan. 1 to the following day to ensure the game would be safe for all fans in attendance. However, why were those safety precautions not taken beforehand, when thousands of travelers had not yet arrived in the city? Even in the hours before, how was Jabbar able to drive through a crowd of people on a street that was supposed to be closed to motor vehicles?
The day after the attack, city officials shared during a press conference that the barricade blocking the street to vehicles had malfunctioned and was removed earlier in the evening. A temporary SUV blockade was set up as a substitution, but it left a large gap wide enough for Jabbar’s truck to fit through. Police and other first responders knew thousands of people would be on the streets on New Year’s Eve, so ensuring their safety should have been a top priority. The entire attack could have been prevented if the opening that allowed his truck to access the streets had been fully blocked.
The FBI released statements and videos from Jabbar showing him mapping out the area he was planning to attack. Those videos were posted to his Facebook account hours before the attack. Jabbar released another video seven days before that attack, explaining his plan to kill his family and how he joined ISIS over the summer. Having posted all of these videos well before that attack, why was Jabbar not flagged on Facebook for these posts? According to Facebook’s community guidelines, any post involving violence is supposed to be flagged. Many social media platforms’ guidelines include similar statements, but why are flagged videos and posts not taken seriously? At most, a flagged video is typically removed from the platform. However, posts with threats to commit acts of violence should be reported to law enforcement almost immediately after being posted.
In times of hardship and distress, it is our job as citizens to come together and help keep our communities safe. We have seen examples of communities uniting to fight against violence and hate. The biggest example of this is the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, which took the lives of almost 3,000 people. While the recent attack in New Orleans was not at the same scale as the 9/11 attack, any purposeful act of terror, no matter the scale, should be reason enough to come together and work to stop terror in our country.
