Network coverage of jubilant New Year’s celebration turned to tragedy early this morning, with special reports on mass casualties after a vehicle traveling at high speed rammed into revelers along Nw Orleans’ Bourbon Street.
Authorities said that at least 10 people were killed and more than 30 people were injured. The suspect is now dead, the FBI said. Authorities earlier said that the suspect fired on officers.
Federal law enforcement is investigating the incident as “an act of terrorism,” according to a statement from the FBI.
At about 3:15 a.m. ET, a man drove a pickup truck down Bourbon Street at a “very fast pace, and it was very intentional behavior,” said New Orleans Police Department Supt. Ann Kirkpatrick. “This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could. It was not a DUI situation. This is more complex and more serious based on the information we have right now.”
She said that the driver went around police barricades, and that he was “hellbent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”
The perpetrator fired on New Orleans officers “from his vehicle when he crashed his vehicle,” Kirkpatrick said. Two officers were shot and they are in stable condition, she said.
She said that more than 300 officers were deployed in the area last night.
President Joe Biden was briefed this morning on the news, and the White House has been in touch with Cantrell to offer support. The FBI will be taking over the investigation, Kirkpatrick said.
There was some confusion earlier, as New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell described the incident as a “terrorist attack” to reporters, but Alethea Duncan, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, appeared to dismiss that claim.
The FBI said it was investigating at least one suspected improvised explosive device at the scene, Duncan said.
The incident took place just hours before the start of the Sugar Bowl at the city’s Superdome.
All of the broadcast networks went to special reports along with cable news coverage, pushing lighter segments from morning shows.
On NBC News, a witness, Jimmy Cothran, described seeing eight bodies that had been “mowed over,” as he and others were in lockdown in a nightclub. One man had tired tracks across his back and stomach.
The incident quickly drew comparisons to a vehicle attack on a Christmas market last month in Magdeburg, Germany. A suspect, a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia with a history of anti-Islamic rhetoric, was arrested, but Germany’s interior minister said this week that they cannot jump to conclusions as to a motive, according to Reuters.
More to come.
