By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to New Orleans on Monday to offer comfort to the community after a U.S. Army veteran killed 14 people and injured dozens by ramming a truck into a crowd of revelers on New Year’s Day.
Biden, a Democrat who leaves office on Jan. 20, said on Sunday that he would deliver a personal message to the loved ones of those killed if he got to meet with them alone.
“My message is going to be personal,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “They just have to hang on to each other.”
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the Texas man who drove the truck and who was killed in a shootout with police, was an Army veteran struggling to get past a recent divorce but who showed no signs of anger in the weeks before the attack, according to his half-brother.
The FBI said the 42-year-old, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State extremist group, acted on his own.
Biden underscored that conclusion.
“I spent literally 17, 18 hours with the intelligence community from the time this happened, establishing exactly what happened. And we established beyond any reasonable doubt that New Orleans was an act of a single man,” Biden said. “He had real problems in terms of his own, I think, mental health going on, and he acted alone.”
Biden, like other presidents before him, has made multiple trips during his time in office to comfort communities after natural disasters or acts of violence.
The president’s first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash, and his adult son died of cancer.
“I’ve been there,” he said on Sunday evening.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Don Durfee and Gerry Doyle)
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