Warning: This episode contains descriptions of violence and death.A mere three hours into 2025, terrorism struck in downtown New Orleans.The Times journalists Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mike Baker, and Christina Morales discuss what we know about the attack, the man who carried it out and the victims.Guests: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, a reporter at The New York Times covering criminal justice.Mike Baker, a national reporter for The New York Times.Christina Morales, a reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The attack left 15 dead and about three dozen injured, and followed a distressingly familiar pattern of assailants turning vehicles into weapons.The man identified as the suspect served in the U.S. military, worked at Deloitte and grew increasingly devout.The attacker most likely acted alone, officials said.Who were the people killed in the attack?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What happened in New Orleans on New Year's Eve?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. A mere three hours into 2025, terrorism struck in downtown New Orleans. Today, what we know about the attack, the man who carried it out, and the victims. I spoke with my colleagues, Nicholas Bogle-Purose, Mike Baker, and Christina Morales. It's Friday, January 3rd.
Lauren and Meg, we're just out here dancing through life, enjoying the final hours of 2024.
Nick, I wonder if you can set the scene for us in the French Quarter of New Orleans on New Year's Eve.
yeah this is a new year's eve in new orleans it's a place where thousands of people come every year to celebrate the new year to drink all night to be with their friends to stay out late to roam around the streets and go from bar to bar and that's exactly what people were doing this new year's eve like every year and at the heart of the french quarter is bourbon street
And it is one of the most famous streets in New Orleans, if not the country. And even at 3 a.m., especially on New Year's Day, New Year's Eve, there are people on the sidewalks under these neon signs getting an Uber or figuring out their next move. And then around 3.15, all of that changes. It was at that time that a white pickup truck was driving to this area.
Normally in this area, there are these metal barricades or bollards. In this case, there's a lot of questions about whether those were missing because the city has undertaken this renovation process of the bollards.
What we know is that what was blocking the street was a police car that the truck was able to speed around by seemingly going up onto the sidewalk where there was a big group of people and then started accelerating down Bourbon Street extremely fast.
The guy in the pickup truck just punched the gas and mowed over the barricade.
There's people pulling each other out of the way, jumping out of the way at the last minute, people looking at their phones and then suddenly looking up at this loud noise and having maybe half a second to save their lives.
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Chapter 2: Who were the victims of the attack?
And so I think for a lot of people, there was this question of whether there was a coordinated attack across the country and fears of what might happen next.
Right. That was the feeling by the end of New Year's Day. I felt it, that there was the distinct possibility from what the police were raising that there was a coordinated multi-location attack happening.
I think that's right, exactly. And part of the reason I think people thought these attacks might be connected in New Orleans and Las Vegas is because the drivers of both cars had apparently rented them through this fairly obscure car rental company called Turo, where... people rent out their personal vehicles to others.
Chapter 3: What do we know about the attacker?
And so, you know, I think people were coming up with all kinds of theories about whether this was an attack that had been planned, that people had coordinated in choosing a certain rental service or doing this or that, and that more attacks could be coming.
Then on Thursday morning... We do not assess at this point that anyone else is involved in this attack except for Shamsa Din Jabbar.
The FBI and other officials come out and say definitively that they are quite confident that the attacker in New Orleans was acting alone, that he apparently did not have any help. Those reports turned out to be misinformation or not actual devices.
What we end up finding out is that the people who were standing around those coolers with the explosive devices were just bystanders, just people taking a look at something on the street and that they apparently had no involvement in placing them there or knowing what was inside. They said that they do have the attacker on video planting those coolers with the explosive devices.
All the resources. of the FBI are being focused on tracking down every piece of evidence, every lead.
The FBI said that they've recovered three phones tied to the attacker, that they're also going through two computers that they recovered. They are executing search warrants. They are combing through a bunch of tips and surveillance video. And they also asked anyone who had interacted with him in the last few days to come forward. And now the question has turned to how this man who was a U.S.
Army veteran and had a stable job had ended up becoming radicalized and pledging allegiance to ISIS and wanting to carry out as much destruction as possible in the heart of New Orleans.
After the break, my colleague, national reporter Mike Baker, on what we've learned about the suspect. We'll be right back. Mike, now that we understand from authorities that the suspect acted alone, what are we learning about his specific motivations and how it is that he goes from serving in the U.S.
Army, in theory protecting America, to becoming a supporter of ISIS who seems bent on killing Americans?
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Chapter 4: Was the attack coordinated with others?
Yeah, we spent a lot of our time the last two days tracing his life, trying to get to the bottom of that switch. You know, Jabbar grows up in Texas. He's raised a Christian, at some point converts to Islam. He goes off to the army. He deploys to Afghanistan as part of the war on terror. He earns a... Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. Wow. In the military, he's doing HR work and IT work.
And then as he transitions out of the Army, he puts those skills to use. He goes to Georgia State. He gets a bachelor's degree in computer information systems. Then he goes back to Texas, works in real estate. And he actually posts a YouTube video at one point
Good evening. I'm Shamsuddin Jabbar, property manager with Blue Metal Properties and Team Lead.
Where he's talking about his real estate business and he really, you can see him projecting a self-confidence.
I've been here all my life, with the exception of traveling for the military, where I spent 10 years as a human resources specialist and IT specialist, where I learned the meaning of great service and what it means to be responsive. That he... Has picked up skills in the military that are helping him now today. So once we get to the closing table, all the I's are going to be dotted.
All the T's are going to be crossed. Everything's going to go off without a hitch.
And that tech savviness he shows, you know, ultimately he lands himself a six-figure job at Deloitte, a really prominent consulting firm. So in the middle of all this, the people around him, his friends, his family, they're seeing a guy who's living... a normal and frankly successful life. A former schoolmate talks about him as being the quiet and studious type.
A former neighbor we talked to said he was the kind of guy who would always refer to her as ma'am. He'd say, ma'am, hey, do you want some help with that? Can I help you bring in your groceries? Even his brother that we talked to, his brother spoke to Jabbar just a couple weeks ago and saw no inkling that there were any problems, that he was on a path to do something so horrific.
And even at that consulting job that he had, Someone sent me a copy of his out of office reply that was still active as of yesterday. And he says he's out of town. Please expect a delay in response during this time. That's what he wrote. If the matter is time sensitive, please call or text me. That was the last message he had left there at his consulting job.
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Chapter 5: How did law enforcement respond to the attack?
So he lays out there also some difficulties in his own work in real estate. Then more recently, some of the people who knew him described him as becoming erratic. We spoke to the husband of his first ex-wife. And he said they had grown so concerned about his behavior that they had decided to limit the contact he was having with his two daughters.
Hmm. So his first wife and her new husband think that he's now a danger to his daughters. Do we know why they conclude that?
We don't know exactly, but they felt like his behavior was becoming more unpredictable and a little bit frightening and suggested it had something to do with his religious beliefs growing more fervent. And what evidence do we have that his religious beliefs do grow more fervent? Well, the FBI in a press conference has now released more details on that question.
They describe videos that Jabbar posted in the hours right before the New Orleans attack. They say he posted five videos, and in one of them, he describes how he joined ISIS before last summer, that he talked about initially having the idea of harming his own family and friends, but he worried that
that taking an action like that would result in news coverage that would not focus on what he said was, quote, the war between the believers and the disbelievers. And, you know, what's extraordinary about these videos is he starts posting them at 1.29 a.m. on the day of the attack and posts the last one a little after 3 a.m., just... minutes before the attack begins.
And in one of them, he provided what the FBI described as a will and testament, suggesting that he knew he was headed to a situation where he was going to die.
Like, there was this period when attacks by people who said they had been inspired by ISIS, who claimed they had joined ISIS, became terrifyingly familiar all over the world within the past decade. And in some of those cases, the people who carried out the attacks were in direct communication with ISIS, often online. They were communicating with them, in some cases taking guidance from them,
But in other cases, it seemed to be a process of self-radicalization. People who had watched ISIS videos, read the propaganda, and then decided to act on their own. That was the case with the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
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Chapter 6: What was the background of the attacker?
That seemed to be the case with the last major ISIS-inspired attack in the U.S., which was in 2017 in New York by a man who claimed loyalty to ISIS before he drove a truck there. along the West Side and killed a bunch of people. Do we have any sense in this case of which version we're talking about, what this man's relationship to ISIS actually was?
That's one of my big lingering questions. Investigators are searching certainly for that level of coordination or communication, but haven't disclosed any at this point. We've been doing our own searching through his really deep history on the internet and have yet to find any direct connections between himself and ISIS operatives. But that's certainly an open question.
How did he get onto this path that he describes now in these videos?
So in the end, we don't really know if this is about... ISIS or an unstable person latching onto the idea of ISIS as a rationale.
Yeah, there are still a lot of questions to be answered here.
The thing I can't get out of my head is something you said earlier, Mike, about how when Jabbar was in the military, he'd been given an award for participating in the war on terrorism. And now, here we have the same person all these years later participating in an act of terrorism. And that's just really hard to wrap your head around.
Yeah, it is. You know, I... To your point, one of the things that has stood out to me this week was a photo that was posted in 2013 by the 82nd Airborne Division where Jabbar was serving at the time. You know, it's a photo of him sitting in front of a laptop doing his IT work for the military. And there in the comments under the photo is his mom. She writes in there how proud they are of him.
And she expresses thanks to all the people who are serving in the military, protecting the country. And now that family is trying to make sense of what happened this week. You know, how Jabbar had gone from someone who was protecting Americans to someone who has now murdered Americans.
On Thursday afternoon, a fuller picture emerged of the 14 victims of Wednesday's attack who had come to Bourbon Street to celebrate the year that was and the year to come.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of this attack?
She was like probably one of the favorite grandchildren of this entire family. The proudest moment of her grandmother's life, for sure, was during her graduation in May. They had a party right before the actual ceremony where her mother made bouquets of money that they had given to her. And then they all got dressed. She got dressed in her, like, red cap and gown.
And all her family went in T-shirts with her face on it. Like, even the babies of the family went in ones with her face on it.
So the idea was that she would look out into the crowd on her graduation day and see every member of her family wearing a T-shirt bearing her face.
Mm-hmm.
Well, what's the story of how she ends up on Bourbon Street on New Year's Day around 3 a.m.?
Yeah, so that was a surprise to her family and even some of her close friends that she was in New Orleans at all. When I spoke to her family yesterday, they had no idea that she had been there. And they said that if they had known that she was planning on it, that they would have convinced her otherwise.
Why?
Because her grandmother in particular talked about how she has always worried about these sorts of attacks, mass shootings, etc. on holidays. So she said that she would have convinced her otherwise to not go there.
And Christina, what did the family tell you about their reaction to that information? That their daughter or their granddaughter, someone they didn't even know was in New Orleans, was there and had been one of the victims of this terror attack?
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