NEW ORLEANS — Jeremi Sensky was returning to his hotel after having met friends early on New Year’s Day when he heard a "massive noise" — the last thing he remembers before he ended up face down on the ground with his wheelchair smashed around him.
Sensky survived the fatal terrorist attack on Bourbon Street on Wednesday morning, when a Texas man inspired by the Islamic State rammed a truck into a crowd of revelers celebrating in New Orleans' French Quarter. He spoke to NBC News from his hospital room, where he is recovering with two broken legs.
"I’m assuming I got hit by the truck, but honestly, nobody’s ever told me that, so I don’t know," Sensky said. "But my wheelchair was completely bashed and the pieces were all over the place, so something hit me."
According to the FBI, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, made his way to Louisiana from his home in Texas on New Year’s Eve and posted several videos to social media. Jabbar said in the videos he had originally planned to hurt his family and friends but pivoted to a bigger attack to focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers.”
He drove a rented Ford F-150 onto the sidewalk into a crowd — swerving through barriers and police — before he died in a gunfight with officers. The attack killed 14 people and injured dozens of others.
Sensky was right by Jabbar's truck after he plowed into the crowd.
Everything happened so quickly, he said. One moment he was turning around, and the next he was on the ground in the middle of the sound of gunfire coming in different directions.
"I just heard screaming and I heard gunfire," he recalled.
He couldn't find his phone, so he began screaming for help.
"No one would come, and so I pushed myself on my back, and I saw people, and they were taking pictures from the balcony, and I was screaming out for help, and people were just looking at me," Sensky said.
A cop named Patrick eventually walked over to him and explained that many people were dead, Sensky said. The officer told him he “was lucky to be alive.”
"I kept asking for someone to help me and get me out of there, and it took a while," Sensky said. "I realized that it was a bad scene."
Sensky, who was paralyzed from the waist down before the attack, doesn't believe anyone realized he couldn't walk as they took in the chaos of the scene. Eventually, he was carried to an ambulance and taken to the hospital, where he underwent surgery.
His right leg was broken in a "million pieces," but he said it saved him.
Sensky said the entire experience has been "surreal." He teared up talking about the attack, emotional in his disbelief that anyone could do such a thing.
"I love everybody. Everybody," Sensky said. "I can’t believe that that would happen."
Tom Llamas reported from New Orleans and Doha Madani from New York City.
