An ISIS-inspired driver of a pickup truck in New Orleans easily steered around a single police car and sped down crowded Bourbon Street, intentionally killing 14 people and injuring dozens more on New Year's Day.
Video released by the FBI shows the suspect on a bicycle riding over a broken vehicle barrier months before he carried out the attack.
The non-functioning barricade was a common site around tourist areas in New Orleans. Defunct and missing vehicle barriers were among security gaps known to city leaders for years before the New Year's tragedy, according to records and reporting by Scripps News.
The city first installed barriers known as bollards after a 2016 vehicle ramming attack in Nice, France left 86 people dead.
A New Orleans public safety report the next year pointed to a similar danger on "densely packed" Bourbon Street.
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"It has become clear how popular tourist areas can be threatened by attackers with vehicles and weapons," the report said.
The bollards went up, but soon after, the trouble with them began.
Scripps News obtained a copy of a confidential 2019 security review that found "the current bollard system on Bourbon Street does not appear to work..." and "even if it does, the bollards do not appear to be in use."
Don Aviv is the CEO of Interfor International, the firm that conducted the security assessment on the ground six years ago.
"The topic of bollards was a big source of confusion, bollards and barriers," Aviv said. "There were some that weren't working, some that didn't appear to be working. We were told that some were kept open, purposefully."
The public never learned the full extent of the barricade failures.
The summary version of the report released by Interfor in collaboration with the French Quarter Management District, a group established by the Louisiana legislature to maintain the tourist area, only mentioned that bollards should be "fixed/improved immediately."
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In an e-mail to Scripps News, Michelle Courseault, executive director of the management district, said releasing the full report would have exposed vulnerabilities of the French Quarter and been a "blueprint for criminals."
In the years after the 2019 report, bollards remained broken.
Video obtained by Scripps News, filmed days after the New Year's attack by a museum security director, shows a bollard no longer secured to the ground near Jackson Square, an area teeming with tourists.
"Those are the foundations where they normally stand," the man holding the camera says in the video. "Using it as an ashtray now."
Looking up the busy location on Google Street View shows a bollard off its mooring and pushed aside in January 2021.
Another Google Street View a year later reveals a bollard missing entirely next to a "no vehicles allowed" sign, leaving an opening wide enough for any large truck to pass through.
The state's lieutenant governor has said the city failed to act on multiple requests to fix bollards.
"Two years we've been asking to get them replaced," Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser said on CNN. "I didn't let that out to the public because we didn't want people to know you could drive through that pedestrian mall."
Bollards were just one persistent security challenge.
The 2019 confidential Interfor assessment that flagged trouble with the barricades also identified other security gaps in the French Quarter. It said security provided by multiple agencies was "handled in a patchwork manner" with "improper or insufficient coordination."
The report said the area lacked enough visible police presence, a problem that only worsened. The number of commissioned New Orleans police officers dropped by 23% from 2019 to 2023, according to a report by the Louisiana legislative auditor.
Police are also taking longer to arrive at emergencies, with response times in the French quarter rising from 8 minutes in 2021 to 10 minutes in 2023, the report found.
A greater police presence on New Year's Eve could've helped by either parking more patrol cars to block intersections or by taking out the truck driver sooner, Aviv said.
"We could have prevented the attack from being as deadly as it likely was but we may not have been able to prevent the attempt itself," he said.
The New Orleans Police Department did not respond to questions about why vehicle barriers were not repaired years ago and whether there is a plan to reverse the trend of slower police response times in the French Quarter.
The office of Mayor LaToya Cantrell declined to answer detailed questions Scripps News sent about why security shortfalls were not resolved.
A statement sent by Cantrell's press secretary, Leatrice Dupré, said the bollards proved unreliable and non-operational. The city was in the middle of a months-long project to replace the barricade system when the attack happened.
New Orleans has since begun installing new barriers to stop vehicles from driving into pedestrian areas with a goal to have more streets and sidewalks protected before the city hosts the Super Bowl on Feb. 9.
