Some killed in carnage decided to travel to city on a whim
By Joe Kovacs
The first details of the New Year’s terror attack in New Orleans are beginning to emerge now that the suspect has been identified as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American man living in Texas.
One victim is 18-year-old Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, who sneaked out to New Orleans on Tuesday from Gulfport, Mississippi, along with her cousin and a friend, 18-year-old Zion Parsons, to celebrate the New Year on Bourbon Street.
She was one of at least 15 fatalities after Jabbar drove a pickup truck down the French Quarter Street in an act of terrorism.
“I just want to see my baby,” Nikyra’s mother Melissa Dedeaux, 40, told Nola.com. “She was the sweetest person. She would give you anything, anything.”
“As a mother, when my niece and [Parsons] said they covered her with a sheet, I just knew that was it for my daughter,” Melissa Dedeaux said.
Known to her family as “Cheyenne,” she was the third oldest of Melissa Dedeaux’s six children.