Adelaide man Patrick Khoo tells of horror New Orleans terror attack
An expat SA couple had just finished celebrating their anniversary in New Orleans when a vehicle slammed into revellers in an apparent terror act. But a sliding doors moment spared them.
SA News
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Adelaide man Patrick Khoo had just finished celebrating his 10-year wedding anniversary with wife Christina Bellantoni when a man rammed a vehicle into New Year’s revellers in an apparent terror act killing multiple people.
Shamsud Din Jabbar ploughed through crowds on the famed Bourbon St in New Orleans’s French Quarter at around 3am.
“We are grateful we made the decision to go home … we easily could have decided to stay out a little bit later and it obviously could have been a much worse situation for us personally,” the 43-year-old said.
Adelaide woman Michelle Tobin had a similar story. She too was nearly caught up in the midst of the attack but was spared by a split-second decision.
At least 15 people died and 35 more injured in what is being described as an apparent Islamic State-inspired terror act.
“It was pretty crazy to wake up to a bunch of text messages from people checking in … we’d gotten back about two hours before it all happened,” Mr Khoo, who now lives in Los Angeles with his journalism professor wife, said.
“It’s definitely scary to think that if we’d been there.”
The couple, whose two children, Maxwell, 8, and Matilda, 4, are in the pair’s hometown in Los Angeles with their grandmother, had brunch the following morning but Mr Khoo said some establishments were closed.
A football game between Notre Dame and Georgia has been rescheduled, a French Quarter ghost tour Mr Khoo and Ms Bellantoni had planned was cancelled “for the safety of our guests and employees”.
“The mood generally, certainly around there was a little more sombre,” he said.
Mr Khoo, who moved from Adelaide to London in 2006 and from London to Los Angeles in 2014, said being an Australian in American he often worries about gun violence and never imagined something like this to occur.
“Certainly the car thing, sadly it’s been happening in quite a few places around the world now, it’s a shock and it’s heartbreaking,” he said.
This is not the first time Mr Khoo and Ms Bellantoni have found themselves at the centre of an evolving tragedy.
In 2015 they married in the Adelaide Hills as a bushfire raged nearby.
As locals and tourists saw in the New Year and readied for the big college football game, the attacker drove down the popular street “at a very fast pace”, New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said.
“He was hell bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did,” she said.
“This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could.”
Jabbar – who was a US citizen was grew up in Texas and spent a decade in the Army – was dressed in military gear and had an Islamic flag on the rented vehicle used in the attack.
The attacker was shot dead.
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