 |
| Newlyweds Jeremy and Brittany Curtis were celebrating the New Year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans when terror struck. It nearly cost them their lives. (Courtesy photo) |
MEMPHIS, TN – A man’s body was contorted in a way that you wouldn’t think was humanly possible. It was a heap of mangled flesh.
Then there was a guy on the other side of the street bleeding from his head as panic ensued all around. He was talking but laid out flat. A woman was lying on the pavement, not moving. She was either unconscious or dead. Others lay motionless and strewn along Bourbon Street. It was a scene of human wreckage. It was pandemonium in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. Revelers moved as quickly as possible to avoid the threat of death, including Jeremy Curtis, who pushed his wife, Brittany, out of harm’s way as the white Ford pickup truck barreled their way. “He had to have been going at least 60 mph,” said Curtis, who arrived in the Crescent City on Dec. 28 with Brittany to enjoy the festivities, the bells and whistles, leading up to the New Year’s celebration. A former Memphian now living with his wife and four-year-old son, Preston, on the outskirts of Washington D.C., Curtis, 33, and his wife, 34, were traumatized and now trying to cope after such a horrific experience. Jeremy is a 2009 graduate of Fairley High School in Memphis. Brittany graduated in 2008 from Whitehaven High School. He’s a healthcare consultant; she works in public health for the government. Their story is like other survivors who witnessed the carnage and having trouble processing it. What Curtis was focused on in that hellacious instance when “bodies were flying in the air” was that he had to save his wife. “I pushed Brittany out the street onto the curb,” he said. “Then I stepped onto the curb myself.” He recalled a young girl getting hit and landing right in front of him. “She and I locked eyes,” he said. “She looked so scared and I was in a state of shock.” Curtis said he closed his eyes to the melee and couldn’t fathom what was happening. The truck had barely missed the reveling couple and left behind a breeze that he could almost feel. “When I looked,” he explained, “I saw him crash into this white and orange equipment.” There was silence afterward, Curtis said, though only for a few seconds. “We just thought it was a drunk driver at that point. We didn’t think it was, as they [FBI] called it, a terrorist attack.” The threat had to be extinguished. “I remember seeing the police running to the truck,” he said. “The next thing we heard were two gunshots and then a bunch of gunshots.” The driver of the pickup truck was shot and killed by the police. Curtis did what he’d done before. After his instincts kicked in once again, he jumped on top of his wife to shield her from the gunshots. “I didn’t let her get up. I just started dragging her to this bar.” The frantic couple wasn’t allowed to enter the bar. After being turned away, they moved quickly, he said. “We went down to the next door to a strip club called Rick’s Cabaret.” He said management was closing the doors. But that didn’t stop the couple from pushing their way into the adult nightclub. “I kind of forced it open and threw my wife in. Then I jumped in after that,” said Curtis, trying to keep from getting shot. “The wreck was only about ten or fifteen yards away from us.” After forcing their way into the foyer of Rick’s Cabaret, before gaining entrance to the bar itself, Curtis made a point to check on Brittany to make sure she wasn’t shot, that she was okay. “I’m yelling and telling them there’s an active shooter outside,” he said, assuming “they didn’t know what was going on outside.” It was business as usual, he determined. They were still partying, still drinking, and the strippers were still stripping. They were impervious to what was happening outside on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. Rick’s Cabaret is a two-story establishment promoted as an upscale gentleman’s club. There are no windows on the first level, Curtis observed. “My wife and I were in the back of the club freaking out.” He wasn’t sure if management knew what was going on. If they did, he believed, they wouldn’t have acted so nonchalant. But then someone came down from the second level “and told us that it was bad.” At that point, Curtis said the lights popped on. “The police were at the door and told us we had to come out right now. They created a route for us with their bodies. They told us not to look back.” Curtis looked anyway. He noticed the carnage, the pain and suffering, when they were being rushed off Bourbon Street. They didn’t stop until they got to the Q&C Hotel and Bar New Orleans, where they were staying, about a 15-minute walk. He described what he’d seen on Bourbon Street as a war zone, something you’d see in a horror movie. At least 14 people were killed and dozens were injured in what the FBI is calling a terrorist attack. Jeremy and Brittany Curtis are newlyweds. They were looking forward to celebrating their first anniversary on Jan. 14. But then terror struck. What they witnessed on New Year’s Day has been unforgettable. “We didn’t get back to our hotel until around five o’clock,” said Curtis, pinpointing the time of the attack at a little after three in the morning. The couple has reached out to their marriage counselor for a recommendation to help them cope with the trauma they’d experienced on that bloody day on Bourbon Street. “She’s connecting us to one of her colleagues who specializes in trauma therapy,” Curtis said. Copyright 2025 TNTRIBUNE. All rights reserved. |
