By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Interviewing New Orleans Attack Suspect

Ruth and Jonathan Chavez witnessed the attack in New Orleans on Wednesday morning and described their ordeal as “scary” and “devastating.”

The mother and 17-year-old son were enjoying their night seeing in the new year and were ending their celebrations in a live music bar on Bourbon Street when the attack happened.

“That’s when we heard the gunshots and everyone started running, and then they ended up locking us in the building and they shut all the doors and told us to get down,” Ruth Chavez told CNN from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

When they went outside, they saw the pickup truck used in the attack just outside the bar they were in and people who were dead and injured in the street.

“We saw the first responders trying to save a young man, and they were working on him for so long, and we were just hoping and praying he was going to survive. But there was no life in him at all,” she said.

Sean Keenan, a freelance reporter for the New York Times, said he interviewed the suspect responsible for the New Orleans attack for his college newspaper in 2015.

Keenan was reporting a story on students at Georgia State University who had served in the military and were having trouble getting their Veteran Affairs benefits, when he was put in contact with Shamsud-Din Jabbar.

Jabbar served in the US Army from 2007 to 2020, in both an active duty and reserve capacity.

“We just discussed what it was like for him acclimating to civilian life and to college life, no less, after military service,” Kennan told CNN.

He said that Jabbar was frustrated with the “labyrinthine nature of the VA programs.”

“I think a lot of military service people, they, you know, learn a certain jargon, they adopt a lexicon that is pretty exclusive to the environments that they’re in, whether it’s in basic training or combat zones or anywhere else. And he found it difficult to not only go through college speaking with his professors, but also he worried about trying to get a job after college and just still having these communicative issues,” Keenan said.

“He (also) lamented that a single missing piece of paperwork or a missed signature could just have you slip through the cracks, have you missing a check that you may direly depend on.”

Keenan said nothing about his character at the time threw up any “red flags.”

“What little I remember about that interview was a very cool, calm and collected guy,” he said, adding that he had a “pretty reserved demeanor” and was “a little bit distant in the way that you sometimes see from veterans who have had difficult deployments.”

 

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