No one visits New Orleans without passing through Bourbon Street. The bars and jazz clubs of this artery which crosses the French Vieux Carré attract revelers from everywhere.
We stroll there with a local cocktail in a plastic glass, while the musical atmospheres follow one another from one establishment to another.
The street was still crowded on the night of New Year’s Day, around 3:15 a.m., when a terrorist drove his van into the crowd, then opened fire with his weapon.
The day after the tragedy, tourists were in shock, knowing that they had passed the place where the carnage took place a little earlier.
This was the case for Jean and Glenn Kinde, visiting from Minnesota to celebrate New Year’s Day, who watched, like a crowd of curious onlookers, journalists from different television networks reporting live from the intersection from Bourbon Street and Canal Street.
The couple was on Bourbon Street the night before, bringing in the new year. But he returned to his nearby hotel about three hours before the attack.
“We heard the news when we got up. It’s horrible,” commented Jean Kinde, looking serious. At the hotel reception, continues Mme Kinde, a police officer, showed them a video of the white van used in the attack, as she sped down Bourbon Street, climbing onto the sidewalk to get around a police car.
“They told us that there were cameras everywhere and that they were looking for a woman and three men who planted explosive devices in different places,” she reports.
Festivities turned upside down
Part of the most touristy district of New Orleans was closed off on 1er January, with an imposing police cordon preventing all traffic. But on a side street, Royal Street, just south of Bourbon, tourists wandered through the souvenir shops as if nothing had happened.
A man on a bicycle was riding around playing reggae at the top of his lungs. “ Don’t worry, about a thing, ’cause every little thing gonna be alright. »
The members of the Charbonneau family, who are traveling in a group of 15 people, were passing through New Orleans as part of a road trip which will take them to Florida. They decided not to go out on the evening of the 1er January.
“The children are stressed, especially since we read in the news that the terrorist did not act alone and that the others were not arrested,” explains one of the mothers in the group, Karine Martel.
PHOTO ISABELLE DUCAS, THE PRESS
Part of the Charbonneau family, from Casselman, in eastern Ontario
The Franco-Ontarian family, originally from Casselman, between Montreal and Ottawa, took advantage during the day of December 31 of the festive and family parade organized for the Sugar Bowl, the university football game which was to be held on December 1er January at the Superdome. The match, which attracts many fans from all over, was postponed for 24 hours following the attack.
Family members were also in the crowd that gathered near the Mississippi River bank at midnight to watch the New Year’s fireworks. “The atmosphere was very good, very friendly. It’s a shame that something like this happened afterwards,” underlines M.me Martel
