How an ‘unimaginable’ truck attack unfolded on one of America’s most famous streets

The new year was just three hours old, the chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” and the sound of fireworks still ringing in the ears of merrymakers, when the pickup truck sped down Bourbon Street – the beating heart of the French Quarter.

The new year was just three hours old, the chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” and the sound of fireworks still ringing in the ears of merrymakers, when the pickup sped down Bourbon Street – the beating heart of the French Quarter. Jimmy Cothran and a friend had just stepped into a New Orleans nightclub when a group of young women pushed their way inside and sought refuge beneath the tables. “We didn’t take any chances,” said Cothran, a 15-year resident of South Louisiana. They ran upstairs, to a balcony. The attack – a brazen car-ramming that investigators say was an ISIS-inspired act of terrorism – was already over by the time Cothran looked over the railing to the scene on Bourbon Street below. “It was just unimaginable casualty,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “The disfigurement, and the bodies strewn. Something you can’t unsee, you’ll never forget.” The revelers’ paradise had been transformed into a killing field at the hands of a US-born Army veteran from Texas, authorities say. He intended to “run over as many people as he possibly could,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said.