NEW ORLEANS (AP) — President Joe Biden is taking a message to the grieving households of victims within the lethal New Yr’s assault in New Orleans: “It takes time. You got to hang on.”
Biden on Monday arrived within the metropolis the place an Military veteran drove a truck into revelers within the French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 30 extra. It’s more likely to be the final time Biden travels to the scene of a horrific crime as president to console households of victims. He has lower than two weeks left in workplace.
Biden and first girl Jill Biden deliberate to attend an interfaith prayer service on the historic St. Louis Cathedral blocks away from the assault and have a non-public assembly with households.
“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 Home press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre instructed reporters aboard Air Power One on the best way to Louisiana.
She went on, talking about Biden’s personal understanding of loss, and mentioned, “He believes this is also an important part of the job that he believes he needs to do as president.”
It’s a grim job that presidents carry out, although not each chief has embraced the function with such intimacy because the 82-year-old Biden, who has skilled loads of private tragedy in his personal life. His first spouse and child daughter died in a automobile accident within the early Seventies, and his eldest son, Beau, died of most cancers in 2015.
“I’ve been there. There’s nothing you can really say to somebody that’s just had such a tragic loss,” Biden instructed reporters Sunday in a preview of his go to. “My message is going to be personal if I get to get them alone.”
Biden typically takes the chance at such bleak events to talk behind closed doorways with the households, provide up his private cellphone quantity in case folks wish to discuss in a while and speak about grief in stark, private phrases.
Along with the assembly with households, Biden hoped to go to with first responders in New Orleans, in keeping with Jean-Pierre.
The Democratic president will proceed on to California following his cease in New Orleans. With a snowstorm hitting the Washington area on Monday, Biden’s journey started with Air Power One beginning its takeoff from inside a big hangar as an alternative of on the tarmac as thick snow coated the bottom at Joint Base Andrews and snowplows labored to clear the runway.
In New Orleans on Jan. 1, the driving force plowed right into a crowd on the town’s well-known Bourbon Avenue. Fourteen revelers had been killed together with the driving force. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who steered his rushing truck round a barricade and plowed into the group, later was fatally shot in a firefight with police.
Jabbar, an American citizen from Texas, had posted 5 movies on his Fb account within the hours earlier than the assault by which he proclaimed his assist for the Islamic State militant group and previewed the violence that he would quickly unleash within the French Quarter.
Biden on Sunday pushed again in opposition to conspiracy theories surrounding the assault, and he urged New Orleans residents to disregard 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 mentioned. “All this talk about conspiracies with other people, there’s not evidence of that — zero.”
The youngest sufferer was 18 years outdated, and the oldest was 63. Most victims had been of their 20s. They got here from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey and Nice Britain.
“How can we not feel for both the families of those who die but also those who’ve been injured in their families?” he requested.
“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.”