Charles Hendrick was in the middle of a DJ set in the club he works at in New Orleans early New Year’s Day when he heard rapid bangs outside the building.
The 50-year-old Camden native later found out that the commotion had been the shootout between police and Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who was killed in the street in front of the club after driving a pickup truck into revelers on Bourbon Street. The terror attack killed 15 people and injured dozens more.
Hendrick has worked as a DJ and master of ceremonies for the New Orleans’ Famous Door music club for the past 13 years, a job at which he has witnessed a fair amount of street violence that he has grown used to.
At first, Hendrick believed the cacophony outside was the sound of firecrackers. He continued with his selection of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” It wasn’t until club patrons started showing increasing signs of fear —panicking, crouching down and shaking as a result of the noise — that Hendrick realized this was not normal.
“When you’ve worked in the French Quarter as long as I have, there are incidents all the time of violence, so you kind of get used to it,” he said. “It’s sad to say, but part of my reaction was, ‘Oh, not this again.’”
Hendrick’s club has a standard protocol for gunshots. After the bangs on Wednesday, staff closed the doors to the main entrance. Police arrived shortly after, instructing Hendrick to turn off the music and telling all patrons to evacuate.
Jabbar was killed after he crashed his truck into a construction vehicle. Police killed him after he emerged from his vehicle and fired at them in front of the the Royal Sonesta New Orleans hotel, which is kitty-corner to the Famous Door along Bourbon Street.
Hendrick caught sight of Jabbar’s body lying on the street as he exited the club and bicycled home. He knew that people had been hit by the vehicle, but he didn’t grasp the gravity of the event until the next day, when he saw the news and had 30 messages on his phone.
“Had I known it was a terrorist incident, I probably would have been a lot more frightened,” he said.
Hendrick and his coworkers were unable to come into work for two days following, since the city closed down the French Quarter for the time being. The FBI is investigating the attack. Jabbar was a U.S. Army veteran who discussed killing his dreams and reportedly had dreams that led him to join the terrorist Islamic State, the agency has said.
“The obvious thing would be that if he was trying to make some kind of statement by killing people and hurting people, which it seems like he was,” Hendrick said. “If I had the kind of a mind where I wanted to hurt a lot of people and get a lot of attention for it, that would be a good place to do it.”
