Biloxi teen saw his friend die on Bourbon Street. Then he had to call the girl’s mother

It was up to the teenager, standing on a French Quarter sidewalk early Wednesday surrounded by crime scene tape and tragedy, to call his friend’s mother and describe how she died.

Zion Parsons, 17, had arrived in New Orleans only a few hours earlier. It was a last-minute trip with his friend, Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, and her cousin.

They were on Bourbon Street a little after 3:15 a.m. when the screaming started. A white pickup barreled into the crowd and Parsons jumped into a brick doorway. When he turned around, Dedeaux was lying in the street, her leg twisted above her head.

Then there were gunshots. Parsons fled. Hours later, after returning to the scene, calling hospitals, pleading with police officers and stopping in at the French Quarter’s police station, he charged his phone and then made the call to Melissa Dedeaux.

“Did you see her laying on the ground?” Dedeaux, 40, asked him.

“Yeah,” Parsons responded, still not certain his friend had died.

“Her eyes was closed?” she said.

“Closed, shut” Parsons said. “I’m still trying to figure out though, don’t jump straight to that.”

“Did they cover her up with a sheet, Zion?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Parsons said. “What does that mean?”

The line went silent. Dedeaux didn’t respond. Parsons began to cry.

Dedeaux, 18, was one of 15 people killed early Wednesday when authorities say 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar turned down Bourbon from Canal Street and into the crowd of revelers celebrating the new year.

Dedeaux was a smart, outgoing girl, “who never got into trouble,” her mother said. She was also a friend of Parsons from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where they both lived. He described her as “a little ball of sunshine.”

Their trip to New Orleans was a spur of the moment thing, a teenage adventure that didn’t include telling parents or any advanced planning.

The trio departed from Biloxi after midnight, Parsons dressed in a black hoodie and athletic shorts, fuzzy socks and Champion slides. Not the best footwear for a party-slicked French Quarter, but it was his first time in New Orleans. How was he supposed to know?

By the time they arrived, the celebration in New Orleans, which was filled with Georgia and Notre Dame fans in town for the Sugar Bowl, was starting to wind down. But Parsons’ night on Bourbon Street was just getting started when he and his friends walked out of Voodoo Chicken & Daquiris on Bourbon near Bienville Street.

That’s when it happened.

Much of the rest of the night was a daze, but Parsons, with help from a series of videos he took, could recreate some of it.

After running, he came back to Bourbon to try and find his friends and recorded what he saw on his smartphone: a body with blood pooling around the head; police ordering partygoers to leave Bourbon; his friend, Nikyra, lying on the street, covered with black plastic, a police officer guarding her body.

“You gotta get out of here,” the police officer tells him.

“Sir, can you check the body for car keys? That’s the person I came with,” Parson asks, seemingly not all there in the trauma of the moment.

Exiting Bourbon Street, Parson turns the camera on himself.

“I just saw my friend die. She’s dead. And if I was a little bit quicker, I could’ve stopped it,” Parsons says. “I haven’t had the time to cry. It’s just so crazy.”

Parsons wandered back past the police tape, out of the blocks-long crime scene to the car, which happened to be open. He called local hospitals to see if she had actually just been wounded. No information was available.

His only clue about her whereabouts was a location tracker on her phone. It showed the device was still on Bourbon.

He arrived at NOPD’s French Quarter station after sunrise hoping to get answers, but police couldn’t help amid the maelstrom.

Standing outside Café Beignet on Royal Street hours later, having made the call to Nikyra’s mother, Parsons was still processing it all, not quite sure about any of it.

He still hadn’t gotten in touch with Nikyra’s cousin, though he would later learn later she was OK.

“It’s different from the movies. It’s real people,” he said. “People don’t talk about what that does to your brain.”

This story was originally published January 2, 2025 at 7:29 AM.