NEW ORLEANS (AP) — President Joe Biden met with grieving households, attended a prayer service and stopped at a makeshift memorial in New Orleans on Monday in honor of the victims of final week’s lethal New Yr’s assault within the metropolis’s historic French Quarter.
Biden and first girl Jill Biden made their first cease within the metropolis at a memorial that sprung up on Bourbon Road, the place an Military veteran drove a truck into revelers, killing 14 and injuring 30 extra.
Flowers and messages had been left on the base of greater than 14 crosses erected on the sidewalk. After Jill Biden positioned white flowers on the memorial, she and the president stood in silence and bowed their heads.
AP Picture/Stephanie Scarbrough
Joe Biden crossed himself, and the couple headed to the historic St. Louis Cathedral close by. The president and first girl met privately with the households of these killed, survivors and native legislation enforcement. Afterward, they attended an interfaith prayer service, the place a rendition of “Amazing Grace” was carried out with a New Orleans jazz spin.
Biden has made dozens of visits to websites of violence, pure catastrophe and different calamities throughout his 4 years in workplace. With two weeks left in workplace, Monday’s go to to New Orleans may very well be his final such journey.
“I think what you’re going to see this president do today is show up for the community, be there for the community in the hardest time,” White Home press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre informed reporters aboard Air Pressure One on the best way to Louisiana.
She added, “He believes this is also an important part of the job that he believes he needs to do as president.
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It’s a grim task that presidents perform, though not every leader has embraced the role with such intimacy as the 82-year-old Biden, who has experienced a lot of personal tragedy in his own life. His first wife and baby daughter died in a car accident in the early 1970s, and his elder son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.
“I’ve been there. There’s nothing you can really say to somebody that’s just had such a tragic loss,” Biden informed reporters Sunday in a preview of his go to. “My message is going to be personal if I get to get them alone.”
Biden usually takes the chance at such bleak events to talk behind closed doorways with the households, supply up his private cellphone quantity in case folks need to speak in a while and speak about grief in stark, private phrases.
The Democratic president will proceed on to California following his cease in New Orleans. With a snowstorm hitting the Washington area on Monday, Biden’s journey started with Air Pressure One beginning its takeoff from inside a big hangar as an alternative of on the tarmac as thick snow coated the bottom at Joint Base Andrews and snowplows labored to clear the runway.
In New Orleans on Jan. 1, the motive force plowed right into a crowd on Bourbon Road. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who steered his dashing truck round a barricade and plowed into the gang, later was fatally shot in a firefight with police.
Jabbar, an American citizen from Texas, had posted 5 movies on his Fb account within the hours earlier than the assault wherein he proclaimed his assist for the Islamic State militant group and previewed the violence that he would quickly unleash within the French Quarter.
Biden on Sunday pushed again in opposition to conspiracy theories surrounding the assault, and he urged New Orleans residents to disregard them.
“I spent literally 17, 18 hours with the intelligence community from the time this happened to establish exactly what happened, to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that New Orleans was the act of a single man who acted alone,” he mentioned. “All this talk about conspiracies with other people, there’s not evidence of that — zero.”
The youngest sufferer was 18 years previous, and the oldest was 63. Most victims have been of their 20s. They got here from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey and Nice Britain.
through Related AP Picture/Matthew Hinton
Louisiana Sen. Invoice Cassidy, a Republican, was requested on “Fox News Sunday” what town hoped for from Biden’s go to.
“How can we not feel for both the families of those who die but also those who’ve been injured in their families?” he requested.
“The best thing that the city, the state, and the federal government can do is do their best to make sure that this does not happen again. And what we can do as a people is to make sure that we don’t live our lives in fear or in terror — but live our lives bravely and with liberty, and then support those families however they need support.”
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Jean-Pierre mentioned Monday that Biden was directing extra assets to assist New Orleans with main upcoming occasions, together with Mardi Gras and the Tremendous Bowl, with each occasions being assigned the best degree of federal assist for safety measures.
Related Press writers Fatima Hussein in Washington and Michelle L. Value in New York contributed to this report.
