An 18-year-old New Orleans girl was among the 15 tragic fatalities following a devasting attack where a man rammed his pickup truck into a crowd during New Year’s Day celebrations.
Zion Parsons, 18, arrived in New Orleans only a few hours earlier on a last-minute trip with his friend, Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, and her cousin. The two were on Bourbon Street a little after 3:15 a.m. when white truck plowed into the masses, and Parsons jumped into a brick doorway. When he turned around, he saw Dedeaux lying in the street, her leg twisted above her head.
Parsons fled the scene, and hours later, he returned to talk to police officers and call the local hospitals about her whereabouts. He then charged his phone and called Melissa Dedeaux, Nikraya’s mother. “Did you see her laying on the ground? Her eyes closed,” Dedeaux, 40, asked him. “Yeah. Closed shut,” Parsons responded.
Melissa then asked Parsons if authorities had covered Nikyra’s body with a sheet. Parsons replied that they did, and Melissa began to cry.
He emotionally recalled: “I hadn’t had time to cry up until I called her mother, and she asked me, ‘Where’s my baby?'” and admitted, “That broke me.” Parsons told the Associated Press the truck came barreling through, throwing people into the air “like in a movie scene,” he described. “It hit her and flung her like at least 30 feet, and I was just lucky to be alive,” Parsons said, the AP reported.
Parsons said he saw the man get out of his truck and shoot at people as he ran away, but what shook him the most was the gruesome aftermath of the incident.
“Bodies, bodies all up and down the street, everybody screaming and hollering. People crying on the floor, like, brain matter all over the ground. It was just insane, like the closest thing to a war zone that I’ve ever seen,” Parsons said.
Melissa Dedeaux posted a tribute to her daughter who passed away in the New Year’s Day terror attack
(Image: Facebook)
According to reports, Dedeaux had ventured to New Orleans from Gulfport the day before, eager to join the New Year’s festivities. Parsons and Dedaux had planned a spontaneous trip they didn’t tell their parents about.
When Parsons came back to Bourbon, a police officer was shielding her body. “Sir, can you check the body for car keys? That’s the person I came with,” Parson asked desperately. However, the officer made him exit the street.
“I just saw my friend die. She’s dead. And if I was a little bit quicker, I could’ve stopped it,” Parsons said, recording himself as he left the street. “It’s different from the movies. It’s real people. People don’t talk about what that does to your brain,” he concluded.