NEW ORLEANS: President Joe Biden on Monday visited a makeshift memorial at the site of the deadly New Year’s attack in New Orleans, holding a moment of silence before meeting with grieving families and attending a prayer service.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden made their first stop in the city Monday evening at a memorial that sprung up on city’s famous Bourbon Street, where the attack began last week when an Army veteran drove a truck into revelers, killing 14 and injuring 30 more.
Flowers and messages had been left at the base of more than 14 crosses erected on the sidewalk in the French Quarter. After Jill Biden placed white flowers at the memorial, she and the president stood in silence and bowed their heads.
Joe Biden crossed himself, and the the couple headed to the historic St. Louis Cathedral nearby, where the president and first lady met privately with the families of those killed, survivors and local law enforcement. Afterward, they were expected to attend an interfaith prayer service.
The visit is 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.
“I think what you’re going to see this president do today is show up for the community, be there for the community in the hardest time,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Louisiana.
She went on, speaking about Biden’s own understanding of loss, and said, “He believes this is also an important part of the job that he believes he needs to do as president.”
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.
In addition to the meeting with families, Biden hoped to visit with first responders in New Orleans, according to Jean-Pierre.
The Democratic president will continue on to California following his stop in New Orleans. With a snowstorm hitting the Washington region on Monday, Biden’s trip began with Air Force One starting its takeoff from inside a large hangar instead of on the tarmac as thick snow covered the ground at Joint Base Andrews and snowplows worked to clear the runway.
In New Orleans on Jan. 1, the driver plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street. Fourteen revelers were killed along with the driver. 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.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, was asked on “Fox News Sunday” what the city was hoping for from Biden’s visit.
“How can we not feel for both the families of those who die but also those who’ve been injured in their families?” he asked.
“The best thing that the city, the state, and the federal government can do is do their best to make sure that this does not happen again. And what we can do as a people is to make sure that we don’t live our lives in fear or in terror — but live our lives bravely and with liberty, and then support those families however they need support.”
Jean-Pierre said Monday that Biden was directing additional resources to help New Orleans with major upcoming events, including Mardi Gras and the Super Bowl, with both events being assigned the highest level of federal support for security measures.
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Associated Press writers Fatima Hussein in Washington and Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.