Bastille Day -2016- -

At 22:34, a white 19-ton Renault Midlum truck turned onto the Promenade from the Boulevard de Lorraine. It did not stop at the pedestrian crossing. It did not turn toward the sea. It aimed straight down the center of the crowded boulevard.

The white grille became a battering ram. The headlights, two dead eyes, swept over a panicked tide of humanity. People scattered, but there was nowhere to go—the Promenade is flanked on one side by the sea wall, a three-meter drop to the rocks, and on the other by hotels and restaurants with locked gates. It became a corridor of horror. Bastille Day -2016-

The truck did not stop. It zigzagged, chasing the fleeing. It crushed a baby stroller, then a bicycle, then a man who had just called his wife to say he was on his way home. The screams—a sound witnesses would later describe as an animal, high-pitched, inhuman—rose above the still-smoky air. The front of the truck, once white, was now a gruesome collage of metal and flesh. The tires left not tracks, but smears. At 22:34, a white 19-ton Renault Midlum truck

We do not forget.

For nearly two kilometers—the length of twenty football fields—the truck plowed through the crowd. The driver, a 31-year-old Tunisian man named Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, leaned out the window and fired a pistol several times, adding the crack of gunfire to the chaos. Police officers on motorcycles gave chase, their sirens a futile, wailing chorus behind the beast. It aimed straight down the center of the crowded boulevard

At first, there was confusion. The truck was moving slowly, weaving slightly. Some thought it was a drunk driver. Others thought it was a mechanical failure. A man named Samir, a cigarette dangling from his lip, saw the grille of the truck approaching and dove over a low wall into a planter of oleander. He was the first to understand.

Then, the music died.