Joe Biden is taking a message to the grieving families of victims in the deadly new year’s attack in New Orleans: “It takes time. You got to hang on.”
The US president will visit the city on Monday where an army veteran drove a truck into revelers in the French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 30 more. It’s likely to be the last time Biden travels to the scene of a horrific crime as president to console families of victims. He has less than two weeks left in office.
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 eldest 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 told reporters Sunday in a preview of his visit. “My message is going to be personal if I get to get them alone.”
Biden often takes the opportunity at such bleak occasions to speak behind closed doors with the families, offer up his personal phone number in case people want to talk later on and talk about grief in stark, personal terms.
The Democratic president will continue on to California following his stop in New Orleans. The White House was moving forward with plans for the trip even as a snowstorm was hitting the Washington region.
In New Orleans, the driver plowed into a crowd on the city’s famous Bourbon Street. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who steered his speeding truck around a barricade and plowed into the crowd, later was fatally shot in a firefight with police.
Jabbar, an American citizen from Texas, had posted five videos on his Facebook account in the hours before the attack in which he proclaimed his support for the Islamic State militant group and previewed the violence that he would soon unleash in the French Quarter.
Biden on Sunday pushed back against conspiracy theories surrounding the attack, and he urged New Orleans residents to ignore 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 said. “All this talk about conspiracies with other people, there’s not evidence of that – zero.”
The youngest victim was 18 years old, and the oldest was 63. Most victims were in their 20s. They came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey and Great Britain.