New Year’s terror attack in New Orleans shows what can happen when cars crash the party | Opinion
Early on the first morning of the new year, a driver killed at least 14 New Orleans partygoers under the wheels of his truck. Dozens of others on Bourbon Street were injured. All made the regrettable mistake of ringing in the new year on a sidewalk.
For some in our immediate community, it hit even closer to home — the driver killed Tiger Bech, star TCU receiver Jack Bech’s 28-year-old brother. Others learned about the driver, identified as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, and immediately malfunctioned upon attempting to mouth the unfamiliar collection of syllables forming his name. President-elect Donald Trump ran to his social media app Truth Social to blame the attack on the “criminals coming in” and Joe Biden’s “Open Border’s [sic] Policy.” But Jabbar was not only a U.S. citizen, he’s a Houston-area native and Army vet. The only border Jabbar crossed, beside the cliff separating sanity and madness, was the state line between Louisiana and his home.
The detail that stuck with me most wasn’t who printed Jabbar’s birth certificate, but the Texas plates decorating his weapon of choice. If you’re reading this anywhere between those American boundaries our future president is so obsessed about, Wednesday’s grotesqueries were not an isolated incident. If anything, our cities’ designs and our obsessions with cars make this kind of carnage possible nearly everywhere, including here.
Which doesn’t mean the carnage should have happened there, either.
Like Broadway and Hollywood, Bourbon Street is one of the most famous streets in America, located in the pedestrian-heavy French Quarter, many of us have drank, flashed and puked those streets during Mardi Gras. No judgment! I went in 2019 for Essence Fest. Bourbon Street needed its bollards — metal poles roughly the height of a child and sturdy like a fire hydrant — installed to prevent drivers from veering their vehicles from street to sidewalk. The city of New Orleans knows this. In fact, it installed its bollards after a driver in Nice, France killed 80 people after plowing through a Bastille Day celebration.
So, where were those bollards? The New York Times reported that back in 2019 — the same year I was in town vibing to Pharell and Missy Elliott — a security firm informed the city the bollards did “not appear to work.” Only in November 2024 did the city begin repairs. And According to an engineer working on the renovations project, New Orleans was under “a mad dash to rush this job” in time for the Super Bowl next month.
Dozens of families learned that’s not good enough. I’m certain many of you wouldn’t tolerate an airport that announced all the scanners and X-rays used to intercept attacks like 9/11 were out of commission for months. New Orleans still had major, pedestrian-heavy gatherings, including the Sugar Bowl and, painfully, New Year’s. Either the “mad dash” isn’t fast enough, or those events, exciting and economically impactful as they may be, need a new home until the job is done.
What about Arlington, our local sports hub? One safety advocate I spoke to said that when the Cowboys and Rangers play, we’re not close to ready.
Hyacinth Szabó, the president of Walkable Arlington, told me that while some parts of the city are protected from drivers, there “tends to be a high volume of pedestrian traffic in the Entertainment District during sporting events, and not much physically preventing someone from attempting to ram a group of pedestrians crossing, and no practical way to physically protect large crowds of people crossing a street.” This is not surprising whatsoever, especially when you remember Arlington is the largest city in America without public transportation. You can’t watch the Cowboys fumble their season away without filling your tank first.
When I asked the city of Arlington about street safety, Tim Ciesco, a representative from the Arlington Police Department, touted its full-time Event Management Unit. It’s a team of eight officers who “meet regularly and year-round… to ensure those safety plans stay up to date, to address any unique needs that a specific event may require, and to review incidents that occur in other parts of the country and world to determine if there are any adjustments we need to consider.”
Ciesco also told me that the department, in preparation for Friday’s Cotton Bowl and in light of the news out of New Orleans, has “been in communication with organizers since the New Orleans incident and our Event Management Unit is meeting with them this week to discuss safety.”
New Orleans has a dismal history of not being ready; there are entire multi-part films if you want to learn how and why. But the problem of auto violence goes beyond its built environment. Alex Dunn, the secretary for Dallas Area Transit Alliance, told me that the cars we drive work in tandem with the environments we build, especially in our state.
“Texas’ most popular vehicle is the Ford F-150. That is a giant missile on wheels,” he told me. “Any collision with a pedestrian is almost guaranteed to end in their death.” Jabbar seemed to understand that — he reportedly rented our missile of choice shortly before firing it precisely where he wanted.
I’m grateful for Alex. His presence and advocacy remind me I’m not totally alone here in my fury with the actual cause of the violence on our streets, and sometimes sidewalks. Because, as some of you know but: I’m new here. And I’m from New York City. (Thanks for not chasing me out, yet.) And I saw more F-150s my first week in Fort Worth than I’d seen in my entire life in Queens. Another thing? I hardly ever see these massive pickup trucks dotting the city picking up… anything really. Again, I know I’m new here. Still, I doubt most of you I see cruising downtown are carrying timber or fixing roofs.
Another observation, more specific to the Star-Telegram, is how many fatal car crashes our breaking news team has to cover. While many of us were sleeping off or hydrating from the parties we survived, at least nine people were killed in car crashes or shootings. Breaking news writers across North Texas were too busy.
The National Safety Council estimates that since 1992, our country has averaged about 160 traffic deaths around “New Years.” We don’t have to limit it to the particularly dangerous circumstances around the holiday season. In 2023, the most recent year of data from the Texas Department of Transportation, 4,283 people were killed in motor vehicle traffic fatalities. Believe it or not, that number was a 4% drop from the previous year.
Citing the death count out of Arlington, Szabó shows how our backyard echoes the bloodshed state and nationwide. “There have been 291 crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists in the City of Arlington since 2018, 26 of which involved a fatality.”
“These sorts of attacks on crowds are much less common than run-of-the-mill collisions, even if we limit this to collisions involving pedestrians or cyclists. Unfortunately, the city of Arlington does not do enough to prevent this sort of traffic violence.”
None of that is to pick on any one person, but to remind us all that we get the streets we deserve. See, we don’t need border-crossing “terrorists” or radicalized lunatics to kill ourselves. In Texas, or basically anywhere else on American soil, we’re comfortable enough with preventable death. As our reward, we get to watch the party die.
This story was originally published January 7, 2025 at 5:28 AM with the headline "New Year’s terror attack in New Orleans shows what can happen when cars crash the party | Opinion."
