Joe Biden to visit New Orleans to console grieving families of victims
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President said his ‘message is going to be personal’ to those who lost loved ones in new year attack by army veteran. Joe Biden is taking a message to the grieving families of victims in the deadly new year’s attack in New Orleans: “It takes time. You got to hang on.”.
The US president will visit the city on Monday where an army veteran drove a truck into revelers in the French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 30 more. It’s likely to be the last time Biden travels to the scene of a horrific crime as president to console families of victims. He has less than two weeks left in office.
It’s a grim task that presidents perform, though not every leader has embraced the role with such intimacy as the 82-year-old Biden, who has experienced a lot of personal tragedy in his own life. His first wife and baby daughter died in a car accident in the early 1970s, and his eldest son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.
“I’ve been there. There’s nothing you can really say to somebody that’s just had such a tragic loss,” Biden told reporters Sunday in a preview of his visit. “My message is going to be personal if I get to get them alone.”. Biden often takes the opportunity at such bleak occasions to speak behind closed doors with the families, offer up his personal phone number in case people want to talk later on and talk about grief in stark, personal terms.
