NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A driver wrought carnage on New Orleans’ famed French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, killing 10 people as he rammed a pickup truck into a crowd before being shot to death by police, authorities said.

More than 30 people were injured as Wednesday’s attack turned festive Bourbon Street into macabre mayhem.

Among those killed was 18-year-old Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux of Gulfport, NOLA.com reported Wednesday. Her mother said that her daughter wasn’t supposed to be in New Orleans, and that she had sneaked over for the night with her 18-year-old cousin and a friend.

“I just want to see my baby,” her mother Melissa Dedeaux, 40, told NOLA.com. “She was the sweetest person. She would give you anything, anything.”

The FBI is investigating the attack as an act of terrorism. An Islamic State group flag was found in the vehicle.

The FBI identified the driver as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a U.S. citizen from Texas and said it is working to determine Jabbar’s potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organizations. Authorities are also looking into whether other people may have been involved.

Jabbar was killed by police after he exited the vehicle and opened fire on officers, police said. Two officers were shot and are in stable condition, police said. They were in addition to 33 people injured in the vehicle attack.

A photo circulated among law enforcement officials showed a bearded Jabbar wearing camouflage next to the truck after he was killed. The attack happened around 3:15 a.m. in an area teeming with New Year’s revelers.

Investigators recovered a handgun and an AR-style rifle after the shootout, a law enforcement official said. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The FBI said a potential improvised explosive device was located in the vehicle and other potential explosive devices were also located in the French Quarter.

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell described the killings as a “terrorist attack.”

New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the driver was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”

“It was very intentional behavior. This man was trying to run over as many people as he could,” Kirkpatrick said.

New Orleans city councilmember Helena Moreno told WWL-TV that after being briefed on the attack, she understands that “there is a potential that other suspects could be involved in this and all hands on deck on determining who these individuals are and finding them.”

The area is a prime New Year’s Eve destination, and tens of thousands of college football fans were in the city for Wednesday night’s Sugar Bowl playoff quarterfinal between Georgia and Notre Dame at the nearby Superdome.

“When I got to work this morning, it was kind of pandemonium everywhere,” Derick Fleming, chief bellhop at a downtown hotel, told The Associated Press. “There were a couple of bodies on the ground covered up. Police were looking for bombs in garbage cans.”

University of Georgia President Jere Morehead said a student was critically injured in the attack and is receiving medical treatment.

Zion Parsons told NOLA.com that he and two friends were leaving a Bourbon Street restaurant when he heard a “commotion” and “banging” and turned his head to see a vehicle barreling onto the pavement toward them. He dodged the vehicle, but it struck one of his friends.

“I yell her name, and I turn my head, and her leg is twisted and contorted above and around her back. And there was just blood,” Parsons said. The 18-year-old said he ran after hearing gunshots shortly thereafter.

“As you’re walking down the street, you can just look and see bodies, just bodies of people, just bleeding, broken bones,” he said. “I just ran until I couldn’t hear nothing no more.”

Bourbon Street has had barriers to prevent vehicle attacks since 2017, but Wednesday’s rampage happened amid a major project to remove and replace the devices, which left the area vulnerable. Work began in November and was expected to be largely wrapped up in time for the Super Bowl in the city in February.

Hours after the attack, several coroner’s office vans were parked on the corner of Bourbon and Canal streets, cordoned off by police tape with crowds of dazed tourists standing around, some trying to navigate their luggage through the labyrinth of blockades.

“We looked out our front door and saw caution tape and dead silence and it’s eerie,” said Tessa Cundiff, an Indiana native who moved to the French Quarter a few years ago. “This is not what we fell in love with, it’s sad.”

Elsewhere, life went on as normal in the city known to some for a motto that translates to “let the good times roll.”

Close to where the truck came to rest, some people were talking about the attack while others dressed in Georgia gear talked football. At a cafe a block away, people crowded in for breakfast as upbeat pop music played. Two blocks away, people drank at a bar, seemingly as if nothing happened.

“We recognize that there are tourists around us, and we urge all to avoid the French Quarter as this is an active investigation,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said. “We understand the concerns of the community and want to reassure everyone that the safety of the French Quarter and the city of New Orleans remains our top priority.”

President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters in Delaware, said he felt “anger and frustration” over the attack but would refrain from further comment until more is known.

“My heart goes out to the victims and their families who were simply trying to celebrate the holiday,” Biden said in a statement. “There is no justification for violence of any kind, and we will not tolerate any attack on any of our nation’s communities.”

The attack is the latest example of a vehicle being used as a weapon to carry out mass violence, a trend that has alarmed law enforcement officials and that can be difficult to protect against.

A 50-year-old Saudi doctor plowed into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers in the German city of Magdeburg last month, killing four women and a 9-year-old boy.

A man who drove his SUV through a Christmas parade in suburban Milwaukee in 2021 is serving a life sentence after a judge rejected arguments from him and his family that mental illness drove him to do it. Six people were killed.

An Islamic extremist was sentenced last year to 10 life sentences for killing eight people with a truck on a bike path in Manhattan on Halloween in 2017. Also in 2017, a self-proclaimed admirer of Adolf Hitler slammed his car into counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and is now serving a life sentence.

Stephen Smith, Chevel Johnson and Brett Martel in New Orleans, Jeff Martin in Atlanta, Alanna Durkin Richer and Zeke Miller in Washington and Darlene Superville in New Castle, Delaware, contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Jan. 1, 1960 

Nearly 1,000 Black protesters marched 10 miles through the rain and sleet to the downtown airport in Greenville, South Carolina, to protest its segregation policies and its mistreatment of Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball. 

Months earlier, Robinson had come to speak at an NAACP banquet, where he encouraged Black Americans. As he left the airport that night, he sat with NAACP leader Gloster Current in the “Whites-only” waiting room at the airport, where Robinson signed autographs. The airport manager ordered them to move to the “Colored” waiting room. They said no. 

When the manager brought a police officer, they responded that they had a legal right to stay where they were and refused to move. After the incident, Robinson complained to the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall, whose office was already pursuing a case against the airport. In the future, Robinson said, “I hope that we can walk in the airport and sit down and enjoy ourselves.” 

During their march, protesters sang “America the Beautiful” and other songs in what they called their “prayer pilgrimage.” As they arrived at the airport, they were met by a 300-man white mob that included Klansmen. The protesters continued, and 15 of them entered the airport. 

“We will no longer make a pretense of being satisfied with the crumbs of citizenship while others enjoy the whole loaf only by the right of a white-skinned birth,” the Rev. C.D. McCullough of Orangeburg declared. 

The walls of segregation soon fell at both airports.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi lawmakers next year will have to put together two complex jigsaw puzzles when they gather under the Capitol dome for their 2025 session.  

State lawmakers will be required to redraw Mississippi’s 23 Circuit Court and 20 Chancery Court districts and comply with a federal court order to redraw some of their own legislative districts, as well. 

“It’s going to be very, very difficult to do this,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby told Mississippi Today.

Kirby, a Republican from Pearl and chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, said that Senate leadership plans to comply with an order from a  federal three-judge panel who ruled earlier this year the Legislature must create new state Senate and House maps with Black-majority districts and conduct special elections in 2025 under those newly created districts. 

The Mississippi Conference of the NAACP and Black voters from across the state filed a federal lawsuit against the state last year arguing the legislative districts that were drawn in 2022 by the state Legislature diluted Black voting strength. 

The state has a Black population of about 38%. Currently there are 42-Black majority districts in the 122-member House and 15 Black majority districts in the 52-seat Senate.

The federal panel ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the state to create a majority-Black Senate district in the DeSoto County area in north Mississippi and one in the Hattiesburg area in south Mississippi. The panel also ruled the state must create a majority-Black House district in the Chickasaw County area in northeast Mississippi. 

However, the Legislature will also have to tweak many districts in the state to accommodate for the new Black-majority maps. State officials in court filings have argued that the redrawing would affect a quarter of the state’s 174 legislative districts.

“None of us are happy we’re having to do this,” Kirby said. 

Legislative leaders will also have to address changing the boundaries of the state’s chancery and circuit court judicial districts. 

State law mandates the Legislature must complete judicial redistricting  by the fifth year after the U.S. Census is administered. The last Census was performed in 2020, meaning the Legislature’s deadline is 2025. 

If the Legislature does not redraw the districts by the deadline, state law requires the chief justice of the state Supreme Court to modify the districts.

Senate Judiciary A Chairman Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula, will be the main point-person in the Senate for judicial redistricting. 

The current court districts have largely remained unchanged for 30 years. But Wiggins told reporters in November that he wants to substantially redraw the judicial districts based on population shifts and caseload data collected from the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Legislature’s watchdog and research office and other agencies. 

The Jackson County lawmaker, over the objections of some Democrats, tried to push a bill through the Legislature during the 2024 session to overhaul the district boundaries, but negotiations between the House and the Senate stalled in the end.

Wiggins’ reason for trying to overhaul the district lines is that some districts around the state hear thousands more cases than others, and judges receive the same taxpayer-funded salary, regardless of the number of cases they deal with.

House Judiciary B Chairman Kevin Horan, a Republican from Grenada, is the lead House negotiator on judicial redistricting. He did not respond to a request for comment on the House’s plans for judicial redistricrting.  

House Speaker Jason White, a Republican from West, said through a spokesperson that he will “continue to gather feedback from members” and plans to “come forward with a plan for judicial and legislative redistricting.” 

The 2025 legislative session will begin on January 7.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.