42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar was killed in a shootout during the attack on the famed Bourbon Street. CNN obtained surveillance video of his pickup truck as Jabbar maneuvered it around a police car and then sped up into the crowd. A large poll is attached to the back of the truck.
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PeopleTranscript
00:00We are going to start with all of the fallout from the two apparent terrorist attack.
00:06I say apparent because clearly New Orleans was.
00:10And to me, common sense tells you that so was Las Vegas, but they have yet to determine
00:16that officially.
00:17You're saying blowing up a truck in front of a hotel owned by the president-elect might
00:23be trying to send a message?
00:24When the truck is manufactured by Elon Musk, yes.
00:28Yes.
00:29That's exactly what I'm saying.
00:30OK.
00:31All right.
00:32OK.
00:33Now that we've established that, let's go to New Orleans for the start.
00:37So you know, obviously, what happened here, that the terrorist here, Housham Sadeem Jabbar,
00:46drove this truck into this massive crowd on Bourbon Street.
00:50There it is.
00:51That's jumping the barrier, going around cops, and just mowing down people in a three block
00:58area before he gets out of the car and is shot dead by police.
01:02So we know all of that.
01:03Now, they've revised the number of dead from 15 to 14.
01:0815, including him.
01:10So that was the revision.
01:11He was the 15.
01:12He would be the 15.
01:14So let's talk a little bit about what is really important now.
01:20The FBI has pivoted, that they are no longer saying they believe he had help.
01:25That was alarming beyond words.
01:28Scary.
01:29So this is far less scary, if you really think about it, because the idea that there's this
01:34terrorist cell that has been activated in New Orleans.
01:38With at least four people still in the loops.
01:40And they're about to have the Sugar Bowl and everything else is a scarier concept.
01:44Not that this is great, that there could be one guy acting alone, but I got to feel a
01:49lot safer if I'm in New Orleans right now than I did 24 hours ago.
01:54Absolutely.
01:55You know, they said there were three men and a woman that they believed might have
01:58been accomplices here.
02:00And I think a lot had to do with these IEDs that they found in that vicinity in the French
02:06Quarter.
02:07They found, I believe, three.
02:10And now the surveillance video shows it was Jabbar who planted them.
02:16So they have now backed off what they said.
02:19And they're getting some criticism for this, by the way, that, you know, they shouldn't
02:23have put the alarm out the way they did before they knew.
02:28But maybe they were just being cautious.
02:30It's a tough situation, because you want to try to be transparent and help people know
02:35where you know and talk about what you don't know.
02:38But it's a challenging thing, communicating in one of these situations.
02:42And that's fair.
02:43But essentially, these improvised explosive devices were planted by him.
02:48Potentially were going to be remotely detonated by him.
02:51Of course, the good news is that they didn't explode.
02:55Going back to that, you know, they also found, it's stated that they found IED components
03:00in the trailer park where he lived right before the attack.
03:03And I think we can also gain a better picture on the mindset he was in before these attacks.
03:07You know, looking at his history, we spoke to his ex-wife, who said he was abusive and
03:12he's been arrested for theft before.
03:14And he pled guilty to multiple misdemeanors and was also sued for delinquent child support.
03:19So after his time in the military, you can really see how he took a turn and where his
03:24mind was at before these attacks.
03:25And there's one other thing that we found in court documents.
03:29In 2020, his then wife, who he was in the process of divorcing, got a restraining order
03:36against him.
03:37And the restraining order talks about all sorts of things, including prohibiting him
03:43from engaging in violence against her or their child, kidnapping their child, taking the
03:50child out of school.
03:53It's a massive restraining order.
03:56A lot of that is just kind of, you know, when you get a restraining order, they list all
04:00of these things.
04:01But it is interesting because in the hours before the attack, he was recording things
04:09as he was driving to New Orleans.
04:11And one of the things he recorded was that he said he was initially thinking of just
04:17killing his family.
04:18Right.
04:19And that essentially killing his family wasn't going to get enough attention.
04:23It would just be covered as a family drama and not something that would draw the attention
04:28of the world.
04:29And he got exactly what he wanted.
04:31And you know, as somebody who seemed to be following ISIS, this is part of the ISIS playbook.
04:37Also part of the ISIS playbook is to record a last will and testament, essentially knowing
04:42that you're probably going to die in the attack.
04:43He did that right before the attack as well.
04:46And you can see he was trying to inflict as much damage and get as much attention for
04:51doing it as possible.
04:53We also know that New Orleans right now, the city officials are getting some heat over
05:01the fact that the barricades, that the devices that they were going to use to prevent cars
05:06from coming in wasn't completed.
05:08Right.
05:09And if you think about, like, if you've been to Capitol Hill in Washington anytime recently,
05:14they have what's called ballards, which are basically these things that come up out of
05:18the street that make it harder for a car to ram into a crowd.
05:21And after we've seen cars ram into crowds all over the world for years now in terrorist
05:27attacks.
05:28And recently.
05:29Yeah.
05:30Recently we saw it in Europe that the thought is that you need them.
05:32So New Orleans is about to host the Super Bowl.
05:34So they thought, we need them for this.
05:36We're going to have a whole lot of people there.
05:38So we're going to have this plan to get them up and running.
05:40Well, they weren't up and running in time for New Year's Eve.
05:43So if it's good enough for the Super Bowl crowd, it wasn't good enough for them.
05:46And my question for you as an attorney is, could there be a lawsuit here?
05:51Could the city or the state or somebody be liable from these victims' families who say,
05:56if this was in place, my loved one would still be here?
05:58Yeah.
05:59And it's a fair question.
06:00And I can't answer it.
06:01And I'll tell you why.
06:03This is Louisiana.
06:04They have very different laws from much of the rest of the country.
06:08A lot of it is based on French law.
06:11And it's just different.
06:12And there's something that many cities have called sovereign immunity, which means even
06:17if they do something negligent, you can't sue them.
06:21And there's a lot of reasoning behind that.
06:24I don't know whether New Orleans has that kind of sovereign immunity or not.
06:28But if they don't, you could see that happening.
06:31You could easily see that.
06:32I mean, I would be very upset about that as a victim's family member in this situation,
06:37thinking this is good enough for the Super Bowl crowd, but not good enough for my family
06:41member who's out there.
06:42Right.
06:43OK, we're going to now move to Las Vegas.
06:45Because hours after the New Orleans attack, a Tesla pulled up to the Trump Hotel.
06:52And it blew up.
06:54Somebody inside that car basically had a detonating device.
07:00And you see right there, as soon as it pulled up, you saw smoke.
07:03And then it just blew up.
07:05There were all sorts of explosives in the vehicle.
07:09And they are saying it is a possible terrorist attack.
07:13There are two things going on.
07:14One is, is it a terrorist attack?
07:16Two, if it is, is it connected to New Orleans?
07:19And so far, officials say they do not believe that the two attacks are connected.
07:24There are some similarities.
07:26We know that both of them were military folks who trained at Fort Bragg.
07:31And were both in special forces.
07:32Both in special forces.
07:34Both had served in Afghanistan.
07:37But we don't know the name of this Cybertruck suspect, at least.
07:40No, we actually have it now.
07:42And he is a guy who, like you said, has that background.
07:47But there are two other things.
07:48One is that they both rented vehicles used in the attacks from the same car-sharing company.
07:57That's number one.
07:58Yeah, called Turo.
07:59Right.
08:00And number two, the detonating devices in New Orleans and in Vegas were similar.
08:05So they haven't said yet.
08:06They haven't even said if it's a terrorist attack.
08:09But come on.
08:10I mean, an Elon Musk vehicle, and the biggest vehicle in his fleet now, next to the hotel
08:19owned by the soon-to-be president.
08:20But to me, there is a key difference here.
08:23Which it seems like the Vegas attack was more about symbolism, right?
08:28The symbolism of the Tesla, the symbolism of the Trump Hotel.
08:33It wasn't necessarily about killing the most amount of people possible.
08:37Because if you are in New Year's Eve in Vegas, there were a lot of areas that had a whole
08:42lot more crowds than that one.
08:45You could have driven into some of the crowds there on New Year's Eve, or you could have
08:49found a way to kill more people.
08:50Now, some of this is a testament to the Cybertruck and how strong it is, that that explosion
08:55basically went straight up.
08:57It didn't go into the hotel.
08:58I mean, really, very limited damage, thinking about what just happened there, which is a
09:04testament to how the material that that truck is made out of.
09:07I agree with you, but only to a point.
09:10Because what we don't know is if the driver believed that the explosion would send metal
09:16hurling inside the hotel, which then could have done significant damage.
09:21So we don't know whether he, my guess is he didn't know it was going to go up.
09:26Yeah, but if you think about New Year's Eve in Vegas and the tens of thousands of people
09:30in the streets on that night, there was an opportunity to do something.
09:34So we'll see if these just happen to randomly have happened at the same time, or if there
09:38is some connection.
09:39But so far, officials do not believe there was a connection.
09:42But this does not seem like an accident.
09:44No, definitely not an accident.
09:46And that's strange to even be thinking about it.
09:48Hi, my name is Lashay.
09:50I'm from Baltimore, Maryland.
09:52And the New Orleans terrorist attack was very heartbreaking.
09:56And to see such an act of violence disrupt lives of others and communities was very devastating.
10:01And in situations like this, I feel as though we need to prioritize, like, supporting the
10:06victims of the family and the community.
10:09I mean, it's just unbelievable this is the way the New Year started.
10:13It's a bad omen.