In two attacks, a pair of unravelling lives and remaining mysteries
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It was New Year’s Eve and Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Houston military veteran whose life was coming apart, climbed into a rented pickup truck and drove east toward New Orleans. As he made his way across the Gulf Coast swampland, the native-born Jabbar simultaneously recorded a series of videos he would soon post to social media in which he swore his allegiance to Islamic State and declared his intention to commit mass murder.
The city he found at the end of his journey was heaving. Fireworks illuminated the sky over the Mississippi at midnight. On Bourbon Street, where locals joke there is no such thing as “last call," revelers were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, throwing back hurricanes and daiquiris.
The New Year’s Eve party had been supersized by the Sugar Bowl New Orleans was hosting the next day between two of America’s most storied college football teams, Notre Dame and the University of Georgia. At 2:03 a.m., with the party in full swing, surveillance footage showed a serious-looking Jabbar, 42, salt-and-pepper in his hair, walking along Dauphine Street. He was wearing a long brown overcoat and glasses, and appeared to be holding a phone or a wallet.
Soon, he was back in the truck, a Ford F-150 Lightning with a black-and-white ISIS flag flying from the back. At around 3:15 a.m., he would turn the 6,000-plus-pound vehicle off Canal Street, slipping through a gap in security, and then roar down Bourbon Street into the heart of the party, mangling bodies as he went. The rampage ended only when police killed him in a firefight a few blocks away where his truck had barreled into a crane.
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