A Texan and his 11-year-old son on a family vacation were among at least 84 people killed when an attacker crashed a heavy truck through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in the French seaside city of Nice, officials said Friday.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sean Copeland and his son Brodie of Lakeway, Texas, were killed in the attack.
Copeland, 51, and Brodie were family friends, Jess Davis told the Austin-American-Statesman newspaper.
Copeland was the vice president of North and South America for Kapow Software, Davis said. Kapow is a division of Lexmark International Inc.
The French flag is being flown over the Texas governor’s mansion in Austin in remembrance of the victims.
“While every heinous attack like this is tragic, this latest one hits close to home,” Abbott said in a statement.
Brodie’s fifth-grade teacher described him as “a superstar.”
“Whether in class, performing onstage or [playing] baseball, he burst with talent,” Coleen Serfoss told a news conference in Lakeway.
A photo of Brodie playing in French Riviera waters was posted on Facebook by his youth baseball league, Hill Country Baseball, which said it received it hours before the attack. The post was followed by hundreds of comments, many offering condolences and prayers. Copeland was remembered by several people in the baseball league as a loving and caring father.
A GoFundMe page was set up, seeking to raise $100,000 for the family.
Also on Friday, the University of California said three students on a study abroad program in France were wounded and another was missing in the attack.
UC Berkeley identified its missing student as Nicolas Leslie, 20, one of 85 Berkeley students on a 15-day study abroad trip on entrepreneurship in Europe. Two of the other students suffered broken legs and a third had a broken foot, the university said.
The injured students were not identified.
“May Nicolas Leslie be found safe,” the University of California’s flagship campus posted on Facebook on Friday, along with the hashtag #PrayforNice and the image of a heart painted like the tri-color French flag.
The Berkeley students were studying at a program affiliated with the international European Innovation Academy in Nice, the university said. The program was suspended temporarily as France marks three days of mourning, and students will be given the option of returning home early, the university said.
Leslie, a junior in the university’s College of Natural Resources, was not listed among the dead in the attack, but family members have not been able to reach him, a woman who said she was a family friend said in an interview.
“The last thing that we heard from one of his friends is that he was seen running off,” said the woman, who gave only her first name, Antonella.
Leslie, who was born in Italy and grew up in the San Diego area, was a U.S. national, university spokesman Roqua Montez said. The university did not yet have background information on the three injured students, he said.
In the attack, a man identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plowed into a crowd of some 30,000 local people and tourists attending a fireworks display to celebrate Bastille Day.
The truck zigzagged along the city’s seafront Promenade des Anglais as a fireworks display marking the French national holiday ended. It careered into families and friends listening to an orchestra or strolling above the Mediterranean beach toward the century-old grand Hotel Negresco.
At least 10 children were among the dead. Of the scores of injured, 25 were on life support, authorities said Friday.
Bouhlel was shot dead by officers at the scene.
French authorities were trying to determine on Friday whether he acted alone or with accomplices, but they said the attack bore the hallmarks of Islamist militants. They said Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian resident of Nice, was known to police for petty crime and violence, but he had not been suspected of Islamist militancy.
Despite numerous French officials, including President Francois Hollande, describing it as a terrorist attack, by nightfall Friday, officials still had not disclosed any direct evidence linking Bouhlel with extremists.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, asked if he could confirm the attacker’s motives were linked to jihadism, said, “No. … We have an individual who was not known to intelligence services for activities linked to jihadism.”
A U.S. official familiar with Washington’s assessment said the attack was thought to have been carried out by a “lone wolf” inspired but not directed by Islamic State.
Bouhlel’s ex-wife was in police custody, Molins said. Bouhlel had three children.
Police found one pistol and various fake weapons in his truck.
Thursday night’s attack plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.