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Jada Songy looks over the makeshift memorial on Bourbon Street honoring the victims of the attack in New Orleans on Friday, Jan. 3, 2025. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune) STAFF PHOTO BY BRETT DUKE Names of some of the victims of a terrorist attack on Wednesday are posted at a memorial on Bourbon Street at Canal Street in the French Quarter Thursday, Jan.
2, 2025. (Staff photo by Scott Threlkeld, The Times-Picayune) ORG XMIT: BAT2501021753572045 STAFF PHOTO BY SCOTT THRELKELD Naomi Paulson kneels in front of a makeshift memorial on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, honoring the victims of the New YearÕs Day attack, Friday, Jan. 3, 2025.
(Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune) STAFF PHOTO BY BRETT DUKE People gather at a makeshift memorial on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, honoring the victims of the New YearÕs Day attack, Friday, Jan. 3, 2025. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune) STAFF PHOTO BY BRETT DUKE A memorial to the victims of a terrorist attack on Wednesday glows by candlelight on Bourbon Street at Canal Street in the French Quarter Thursday, Jan.
2, 2025. Photo by Scott Threlkeld / The Times-Picayune A memorial to the victims of a terrorist attack on Wednesday grows on Bourbon Street at Canal Street in the French Quarter Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025.
(Staff photo by Scott Threlkeld, The Times-Picayune) STAFF PHOTO BY SCOTT THRELKELD Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save A photo of Nicole Perez was sent to her uncle in Houston around 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day.
For hours, the family had been hoping Perez was not among those killed six hours earlier when a man sped through a crowded Bourbon Street in a pickup truck. But the shocking picture of Nicole lying on the ground confirmed their fears. The only word her uncle could find to describe it: “Incomprehensible.
” “We were still hoping that this was just a nightmare,” said Raul Perez, 53. “And it was not.” Nicole Perez, 27, was killed in the Bourbon Street attack.
The 27-year-old single mother and deli manager was a victim of the brutal rampage that swiftly took 14 lives and injured dozens more. Police say 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar barreled down the tourist drag in a white pickup, a short spree that lasted two and a half blocks but sowed widespread anguish. For the survivors, recovery is just beginning.
'Assumed he was dead' At University Medical Center’s family reunification center on Wednesday morning, 28-year-old Heaven Sensky-Kirsch just kept thinking about how unprepared she was to write her father’s obituary. Their family was celebrating the holiday in New Orleans, a trip planned after Sensky-Kirsch, who lives in Pittsburgh, visited the city for work a year ago. She knew her dad, an energetic quadriplegic, would love it – “the live music, the energy, the people, the food,” she said.
Jeremi Sensky, paralyzed in a car accident 25 years ago, was returning to the hotel after stopping outside a pizza place with friends on Bourbon. When he didn’t arrive, family members called his phone over and over. Then they turned on the TV to see news of the attack.
They rushed down to the French Quarter, where a police officer told them most victims had been taken to UMC. “We just assumed he was dead,” said Sensky-Kirsch. For her mom, his caregiver of 25 years, “it was like a part of her own body was gone.
” Candles line a makeshift memorial on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, honoring the victims of the New YearÕs Day attack, Friday, Jan. 3, 2025. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune) Around 6:30 a.
m., a nurse stepped in. She said they had a paralyzed man who was talking.
"I can't even describe how lucky he is to be alive, to survive that," said Sensky-Kirsch, talking through tears. Her dad was thrown from his wheelchair near where the truck came to a stop. He was in surgery for several hours to repair broken bones in his legs.
When he came out, he was on a ventilator, trying to make letters with his hands, telling his wife and daughter he had nightmares. Now he is in good spirits and off the ventilator, but the family has a long road ahead. Sensky-Kirsch said her mother can’t use their usual equipment to move her dad because of his leg wounds.
Doctors have told them to take it “day by day.” Sensky-Kirsch and her husband are planning to stay in New Orleans for the foreseeable future while her dad recovers. 26 victims to 1 hospital Sensky is one of eight victims still in the ICU at University Medical Center, which received the bulk of the injured.
Twenty-six patients were initially treated at UMC, the region’s only Level 1 trauma center. Four others were transferred there later from other hospitals. Other hospitals in the LCMC Health system received 11 victims.
Ochsner Health’s hospitals received a total of seven. Dr. Jeffrey Elder, University Medical Center New Orleans, talks about the emergency medical departments response to Wednesday’s attack on Thursday, January 2, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Of the thirty total patients that UMC treated, 16 have been discharged. One, Martin ‘Tiger’ Bech, was kept on life support until his family could arrive to say goodbye late Wednesday morning, according to Kim Broussard, the athletic director at St. Thomas More Catholic High School, where Bech played football before going on to play for Princeton University.
Emergency room director Dr. Jeffrey Elder was awakened by a text message alert about a large-scale mass casualty incident just before 4 a.m.
Treating several trauma victims at one time isn’t unusual. But “large-scale” meant more than 20 – a lot even for UMC. The first thing he thought of was the drunk driver he witnessed drive into a crowd at the Endymion parade in 2017.
But as they started treating gunshot wounds, he realized something drastically different had unfolded on Bourbon Street. Inside the emergency room, the injuries ranged from severe head injuries and lacerated spleens to bullet grazes and multiple broken bones. Patients were confused.
Some of them knew they had been hit by a car. Alexis Scott-Windham, an Alabama resident, didn’t know she had been shot until UMC doctors told her she had a bullet in her foot. She has multiple fractures and will need to return to an orthopedist in the coming weeks.
The emergency room workers were triaging patients and discharging existing patients to make room for the victims. Elder estimates about 20 to 30 extra workers came in to help. 'Like a battlefield' At around the same time, New Orleans Health Department Director Dr.
Jennifer Avegno was walking Bourbon Street, assessing the aftermath. Avegno, who also works in the UMC emergency room, had gotten the alert. As she passed the many bodies, she was periodically calling her teenage daughter, who was in the French Quarter for New Year’s.
“It was a pretty horrible four hours until she finally answered the phone,” Avegno said. Emergency workers are used to seeing dead bodies. But this was unlike anything she’d seen before.
“They're all tragic, but this the scale of this ...
it looked like a battlefield,” Avegno said. Dr. Jennifer Avegno, New Orleans Department of Health director, at a press conference in 2022.
The Health Department set up a 311 line for families looking for people. Nearly 550 calls came in over the next few days. As the FBI cleared the coroner to do the work of identifying victims later Wednesday, Avegno’s team was setting up a reunification room where families could get word about their loved ones.
At least one victim, a Black female, had not been identified as of Friday night, according to a report from New Orleans Coroner Dr. Dwight McKenna . 'Something we can't bring back' Because Nicole Perez's death is part of a federal investigation, her body cannot yet be released, Raul Perez said.
He and other family members traveled in from Houston and are staying in a hotel while they help his sister, Nicole’s mother, who was hospitalized with chest pains shortly after rushing to the reunification center at UMC. Nicole's older sister, who is 8 months pregnant, was also hospitalized after learning of her sister’s death. The family is grappling with how to break the news to Nicole's son, who just turned five.
When he asked about his mom Wednesday night, they changed the subject. A family friend in Houston, a child psychologist, has been tapped to help. Nicole's mother is also in the throws of grief.
“She's asking for her daughter," Perez said. "He's asking for his mom. It's something that we can’t bring back.
” Staff writer Lara Nicholson contributed to this report..
