The night, like countless others Bourbon Street has welcomed over the decades, started out ripe for celebration. With temperatures hovering in the 50s (10-15 Celsius) hours after the arrival of the new year, the open-air party pulsing down New Orleans’ famed nocturnal artery was still hot, drawing revelers from near and far.
After a 3 a.m. pizza, a Pennsylvania man whose family had driven more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to check the city off their bucket list headed back into the music-filled street.
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A pair of former Princeton University football teammates joined the crowd so one could show the other what the city’s easygoing energy was all about.
With years of waiting tables in the city’s restaurants behind him, a New Orleans native came down to watch Bourbon Street’s nightly parade of humanity as he had done so many times before.
By the wee hours Wednesday, the crowd strolling beneath the historic street’s wrought-iron balconies, many with go-cups of liquor in hand, was filled with carefree promise. Then an enraged Army veteran behind the wheel of a speeding pickup turned their night of joy into a nightmare.
“My brother just wanted to go show (his friend) the good spirits and the joy that New Orleans brings, especially on a day like New Year's, all the smiles and the fun,” said Jack Bech, a younger sibling of one of the victims of the deadly truck attack, Tiger Bech. “Nobody thought it would ever end the way it did.”
In the days since the rampage killed 14 and injured dozens more, families and friends have questioned the fates that conspired to put loved ones in the wrong place at a singularly horrific moment. The victims, though, were just following legions who have flocked to Bourbon Street over the years with nary a care.
Paralleling the Mississippi River and bisecting the original grid laid out by the city’s French colonizers in 1722, the street originally known as Rue Bourbon has been a nightlife hub since shortly after the Civil War. At first mostly for men, the arrival of dinner clubs in the 1920s drew couples to Bourbon, too. Visitors returned home to recount its drinking, dining and dancing.
But in the decades leading up to last week's attack, the number of night-time businesses on Bourbon swelled substantially. And the street's prime attraction became the visitors themselves.
Since its bars and clubs flung open their doors and windows in the late 1960s and began selling drinks to crowds in the street, “the spectators have become the spectacle,” said Richard Campanella, author of “Bourbon Street: A History” and a professor at the city’s Tulane University.
“Everyone realized that what Bourbon Street meant was not so much the saloons and the clubs along the street, but the street itself and the pedestrian parade,” he said.
To research his 2014 book, Campanella stood in the middle of Bourbon’s busiest stretch, the very area where the New Year’s attack unfolded, and counted late-night partiers. On ordinary weekend nights, over 100 thronged past him each minute. On the night before Mardi Gras, the number more than doubled. Quizzing visitors on four different nights, he found about 70% came from another state and another 10% from outside the U.S.
That rich street life is exactly what drew so many of those killed in the attack, and likely what made Bourbon a target.
“Bourbon is like a free party,” said Monisha James, whose 63-year-old uncle, retired waiter and handyman Terrence Kennedy, was killed in the attack. She said he went to a favorite spot on the street frequently, often striking up conversations with strangers.
“That was what he was doing to enjoy his retirement,” James said.
On New Year’s Eve, Kennedy donned a pair of festive 2025 eyeglasses and set out for Bourbon Street on his bike, his sister Jacqueline Kennedy said. He joined thousands of others.
Before heading out, 25-year-old Matthew Tenedorio, who worked as an audiovisual technician at the New Orleans' Superdome, gathered with his mother and brother for New Year’s Eve.
“We had dinner and we did fireworks outside, and just laughing and hugging each other and telling each other we loved each other,” his mother Cathy told NBC News. She unsuccessfully tried to convince him not to go into the city.
“They don’t think about the risk,” she said. Tenedorio was killed in the attack.
Jeremi Sensky, 51, had driven with his wife, daughter, son-in-law and two friends from their home in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, to New Orleans, which they had long talked about visiting. Feeling a chill after stopping for pizza around 3 a.m., Sensky decided to turn back to their hotel, daughter Heaven Sensky-Kirsch said. That was when attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s rented truck roared down the street.
Others were able to jump out of the way. But Sensky, who used a wheelchair, was hit, sustaining injuries that included two broken legs. He was able to breathe without a ventilator Thursday after enduring 10 hours of surgery.
“We thought he was dead,” Sensky-Kirsch said. “We can’t believe he’s alive.”
Tiger Bech and former Princeton teammate Ryan Quigley also were in the crowd. Bech, a 27-year-old native of Lafayette, Louisiana, who found a job in New York after graduation, had come to New Orleans to show the city to Quigley, a first-time visitor from Pennsylvania. Bech was killed in the attack, and Quigley was seriously injured.
Rushed to a nearby hospital, Bech hung on long enough for his mother and father to reach his bedside and link other family members on a video call.
“His eyes were closed and he was on a machine, but I know he could hear us,” Bech’s brother said in an interview with Sky News. “God kept his heart beating for a reason, and I truly believe it was so me and my family could tell him goodbye.”
Zion Parsons had arrived from Gulfport, Mississippi, to celebrate a first visit to Bourbon Street with friend Nikyra Dedaux when the truck plowed into them, killing Dedeaux. The 18-year-old had been set to start college in pursuit of a nursing career.
“Bodies, bodies all up and down the street, everybody screaming and hollering,” Parsons said. “It was just insane, like the closest thing to a war zone that I’ve ever seen.”
As word of the attack spread, Belal Badawi, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tried frantically to reach his two sons, who had driven down to New Orleans to celebrate the new year.
The older one, staying with friends at a hotel, picked up. But the father had no luck reaching 18-year-old Kareem Badawi, a freshman at the University of Alabama who was home for the holiday break. He checked the location of the teen’s phone and saw it was in the heart of the French Quarter.
Racing to New Orleans, the Badawis waited for hours in a hospital before investigators confirmed what they most dreaded: their son was among the dead, on a street devoted to celebrating life.
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Associated Press reporters Sharon Lurye and Jack Brook in New Orleans, Martha Bellisle in Seattle, Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, and Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed.