Two MS Coast strangers saw Bourbon Street terror. Their fate depended on where they stood

It was long past midnight on Bourbon Street, and the bars were still busy. Chloe Lemay had just arrived with friends from the Mississippi Coast.

Zion Parsons was on his way. He and two friends had sneaked out of their parents’ homes in Gulfport and drove there to celebrate the new year.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar was in the crowd, too.

Jabbar, the FBI said, had come east from Texas in a rented pickup truck, planted two improvised bombs on Bourbon and then, using the truck as a weapon, surged into the packed street and killed 14 people before police shot him dead.

A premeditated “act of terrorism,” federal agents later called it.

By the end of the rampage, chance placed the young strangers on the same block. Where they stood dealt them very different fates.

On one corner: Lemay, unharmed and grateful, running away as fast as she could.

On the other end: Parsons, scanning bodies in horror and panic for a suddenly missing friend.

Before the violence

Hours before the street fell into deadly chaos, the mood was cheerful.

“It was a vibe as soon as we got there,” Lemay said. “It was just so much fun.”

Her mother had warned her about safety. But Lemay, who works at a plasma center in Gulfport, had recently had another child herself. She deserved a night out, she recalled thinking.

They arrived around 1:45 a.m.

Around the same time, Jabbar was planting an improvised bomb concealed in a cooler several blocks away.

Lemay and her friends walked toward Bourbon Street. They were dancing inside a bar called Little Tropical Isle when Jabbar left another bomb inside another cooler.

By then, he was less than two blocks from her.

Parsons soon got to New Orleans, too. His group had decided to come on a whim, and they were having a good time.

“Be careful now,” Parsons told his friend, Ni’Kyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, as she walked up to some police horses.

She laughed and smiled.

They were surrounded by party-goers, many of them young, all of them celebrating fresh beginnings of the new year. There was a Superdome employee who graduated from Pearl River Central High School. There was a college freshman on break with some friends. There was a single mother to a young son.

Soon, Lemay and her friends wandered down the street in search of a bathroom and briefly got lost. They were walking back in the direction of Canal Street when the white truck began turning.

“Right before it happened,” Lemay said, “we were talking about coming back for Mardi Gras.”

Parsons, Dedeaux and her cousin were down the block near Bienville Street when Parsons started hearing thuds behind him.

Terror on Bourbon Street

The 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran who had recently declared his support for the terrorist group ISIS was barreling toward them. Wearing military gear, hitting people in his path and sending others fleeing, he surged closer.

Parsons looked back.

He saw the white truck and everything moved fast. It looked farther away than it was but they had one second to run. He jumped toward the sidewalk and Dedeaux went the other way. Then it was gone and Parsons looked up.

“Where’s Ni’Kyra?” he said.

His stomach dropping, Parsons tried to process the carnage he saw. He remembers someone on his left doing CPR. Someone was lying still on his right. He saw a woman gasping for breath, a man clutching her head, crying. A girl in the fetal position sobbed.

The street smelled of iron, and the truck sped closer to Lemay.

Parsons stood at the start of the block. “This ain’t real,” he told himself again and again. He needed to find his friend. He started moving. But the driver crashed, then emerged from the truck and started shooting.

Lemay was walking that way when she heard a loud noise, like someone dropping a heavy ice chest. She remembers gunshots. Several. The friends grabbed each other, and one of them pushed.

“Run,” he said.

Parsons was fleeing by then, too, away from the horror that was so close to Lemay but which she would not know the truth of until it appeared on the news in a few hours. He ended up at a hotel. It was 3:19 a.m., he recalled. He was alone.

Lemay saw flashes of gunfire and kept running. People were crowding into bars and the doors were closing and locking. She started hearing sirens.

Another shooting, she remembered thinking. Horrible.

“Can’t even have fun no more,” she said as her friends caught their breath near their car around 3:30 a.m.

Flashing lights screamed past her.

It must have been a fight, Lemay thought. Something petty.

“We didn’t even understand,” she said later.

Shock and mourning

Parsons was determined to find Dedeaux, so he returned to Bourbon Street. All he wanted was to reach her. A police officer guarding her body said no.

In shorts, shivering, Parsons started walking. His memory is hazy. But he knows he was trying to find Dedeaux’s cousin, who was also unharmed. He walked until 6 a.m., visiting police stations until he spotted Dedeaux’s car. The door was unlocked, and he slept there for an hour. He called hospitals and morgues, desperate for news. He heard nothing.

Word of the attack had spread by morning: Fourteen dead, dozens more hurt and the assailant killed after he shot and injured two police officers. Authorities found the two improvised bombs and disabled them.

Back home on the Coast, Lemay’s mother called and told her what happened. “But Mom, that doesn’t make sense,” she recalled saying. “We heard gunshots.”

It was not until she saw the terrible videos spreading on social media that Lemay realized how close to danger she had come. She and her friends had been heading toward the truck when they heard gunfire. Getting lost looking for the bathroom just before the attack, she realized, may have delayed them enough to save their lives.

Her mind shut down, overwhelmed with shock. She went back to sleep, woke up, checked the news, and shut down in sleep again.

In Gulfport, Chaniece Parsons figured her son was at work.

When her sister saw the news, her heart started racing. She called her son. No answer. She waited. She called again. Then she called the police. She hardly get the words out, she remembered.

Then she read a newspaper story. Her son was being interviewed, and was alive.

In the French Quarter, Zion Parsons was getting stopped by reporters. He soon became a calm and collected voice of survivors, who spoke despite his shock to explain what happened and tell his friend’s story.

Lemay consumed herself that day and the next with news of the fourteen victims. She felt guilty and grateful all at once that she was not one of them.

Parsons was determined to make people remember his friend for who she was, not for what happened to her.

But the images in his mind make him shudder.

“A good friend of mine actually passed away,” the grieving teenager told some cameras in the French Quarter that morning. He closed his eyes for a moment, stunned at the horrible truth of it all, then took a breath, looked up and kept talking.

How to help

The city of New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation have created the New Orleans New Year’s Day Tragedy Fund to help victims of families and people who were injured or impacted by the attack. The United Way of Southeast Louisiana has also started a United for New Orleans Relief Fund to support victims and families by covering medical expenses, funeral costs, trauma counseling and more.

Matthew Tenedorio’s family created a GoFundMe to cover his funeral costs.

Chaniece Parsons started a GoFundMe for her son so the family can afford his counseling after he witnessed the death of a friend in the Bourbon Street attack.

Melissa Dedeaux, Ni’Kyra Dedeaux’s mother, has said on Facebook that her family is not accepting donations because they have already received an outpouring of help.

This story was originally published January 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM.