Rush to normality? New Orleans truck attacks survivors fight trauma | Mental health news
New Orleans, Louisiana – It was 3 in the morning on New Year’s Eve, and Tyler Burt, a pedic driver who worked in the historic French neighborhood of New Orleans, decided to take the last price.
He pedaled to Bourbon Street, a busy pedestrian road pulsing with music and laughter. He was a four -member family shortly.
Two daughters in the group wore high heels and their feet were pain from walking. So they climbed the carriage attached to the back of the Burt bike, and he drove them to the corner of Bourbon and channels, their parents who followed them.
Every little movement has since been shaped by the rest of his life.
Burt remembers that one girl was dug through her purse, frowned. “Can you wait for my parents?” she asked, decent, but tired. “They have my phone.”
They talked on a slogan in the middle of night shards: mud of confette, cracked neon-green cocktail cups. The police car was stationed at the end of the street a few meters away, separating parties from traffic nearby.
The parents soon climbed and paid Burt. It was 3:16 in the morning. Burt wished the families a happy New Year, and he and Dad exchanged five high.
“He stood right in front of me, [close] Enough to touch him, “Burt recalls.” As we managed, we turned to the left, and this large white truck turned around the police vehicle. “
It was a Ford F-15th Lightning-Lightning truck ate more than 2.7 tonnes (6,015 pounds)-He pulled down the street straight to them. Burt tried to get out of the way, but his own bike blocked his path; He could only watch.
“First, he overtook his wife. And then he overrun him in front of me,” Burt says. He went so close that, when Burt reached for his dad, he accelerated his ride truck, leaving behind a blood bladder.
He watched the truck accelerate two more blocks down Bourbon Street, breaking into Revelers. When he turned back, two daughters knelt around their mom, trying to shake her, screaming.
The immense clarity descended on a burt in the records that followed, and felt like he had never been so awake in his life.
Burt remembers every detail: the bloody gas on the eyebrows of the unconscious father, screams of fellow Pedicab workers. He would later tell him that she saw the driver’s face as the truck passed by.
In hours after that, the implementation of the law announced that it was not accidental for cars. It was a planned attack, which culminated in the shooting between the police and the driver, the texas veterans Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who died at the scene.
The United States officials called him a terrorist act. Two improvised explosives were discovered nearby, and the Flag for the Isil (ISIS) armed group was found related to the back of Jabbar’s truck.
A total of 14 victims died that day. Another 57 was injured. Family Burt followed Bourbon Street was among those who survived miraculously.
But within 36 hours, the crime scene was cleared and the crowds returned to Bourbon Street. Tourists sipped from pre -monesidated beers and encountered improvised memorials -the remark: wooden crosses with candles and flowers soaked on the roadway.
“We’ll put it all behind us,” Governor Louisiane Jeff Landry said at a press conference on January 2. The night before, he called the New Orleans “resistant city” while sharing a photo By itself in a luxury steak, only a few blocks from the crime scene.
In the midst of mass violence, public discourse often emphasizes the importance of a quick return to normal.
The goal is to alleviate the disabilities of the attacker. But experts warn that such pressure can leave some survivors to fight without proper support.
“Recovery has been a long time from these types of collective trauma. We can’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s gone. We are fine, “said Tara Powell, a professor who explores behavior health during the disaster at Illinois University in Urban-Champaign.
