Alabama Woman Injured in New Orleans Terror Attack Shares How Friends' Call to Her Mother Saved Her Life

As we learn more about the stories of those impacted by the deadly New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans, one Alabama woman is sharing her story of how her friends’ quick thinking after the attack likely saved her life.

In the early morning hours of January 1, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd of people celebrating the start of 2025 on New Orleans’ world-famous Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more.

Mobile, Al. native Alexis Scott-Windham was celebrating with her friends in the area when the 23-year-old says she noticed the truck speeding towards them.

“As we look to our left, we see the truck come down the sidewalk because he was halfway on the sidewalk and halfway on the street. As he’s coming down, he has no lights on,” she told CNN in an interview. “He was hitting people like speed bumps like we were nothing.”

Jabbar’s truck clipped the back of Alexis’ leg. But when she tried to get up from the ground, she realized something else was wrong.

“That’s when I tried to run, but I couldn’t,” she told NBC News. “I knew something was wrong with my foot. I thought it was just a broken bone or something, but it wasn’t. My feet had started leaking.”

When Scott-Windham’s friends realized she’d been shot, they immediately called her mother, who told them to make a tourniquet in order to apply pressure to the area and stop the flow of blood.

“So I just told my daughter’s friend to just tie her other sock around her leg so she wouldn’t bleed so heavy,” Alexis’ mom Tryphena Scott-Windham told NBC News.

Alexis’ friends sprung into action, getting her blood loss under control before a good Samaritan drove her to the hospital.

You might think Tryphena Scott-Windham’s advice comes from years of medical training, but she says she got the idea from watching television.

“I just blurted that out. I was in straight panic mode,” she told NBC News.