The wife of Jared Tucker, the American who died in Thursday’s Barcelona attack has spoken out about the death of her husband.
Heidi Nunes-Tucker, 40, spoke with NBC News in an interview that aired Saturday about the loss of her husband in her first television interview since Jared’s death, which happened while they were celebrating their one year anniversary in Spain.
‘I’d found my person: truly the love of my life. That was obvious to anybody that knew us or saw us,’ she told NBC.
‘And I don’t know that you find that again, and I don’t know that I want to.’
Jared, 43, a resident of Lafayette, California, is a father to three teenage daughters and a stepson. Heidi said he was the love of her life and she’s not sure how she will recover.
Heidi Nunes-Tucker, 40, (pictured) spoke out about the loss of her husband in her first television appearance since Jared Tucker’s death in the Barcelona terror attack Thursday
Heidi and Jared, 43, had been toasting their year of marriage at a street cafe in the Las Ramblas district just moments before the attack
The couple were on their first trip to Europe one year after they had been married. In her first television interview, Heidi said Jared was the love of her life and she’s not sure if she’ll be able to recover from his death
‘What am I going to do?’ she asked. ‘Jared and I always said – I mean, we only were married for a year.
‘I’m 40,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘We’re kind of old and we’ve both been pretty independent for all this time and so, it’s not a matter of not being able to be independent, but I don’t want to do that without him.’
She added: ‘I don’t want to wake up without him next to me, and I don’t want to watch TV without him… All of it is just going to be a lot more empty.’
Heidi and Jared had been toasting their year of marriage at a street cafe in the Las Ramblas district just moments before the terror attack in Barcelona on Thursday.
The couple had decided to do a little shopping afterward at the nearby souvenir huts when he told her he was going to leave to find a restroom.
Minutes later, Heidi realized something was horribly wrong when she noticed her surroundings.
‘No more than … thirty seconds to a minute after he left, all mayhem broke out and people were screaming and crying and running,’ she told NBC.
Heidi said: ‘I don’t want to wake up without him next to me, and I don’t want to watch TV without him… All of it is just going to be a lot more empty’
A vehicle plowed into a crowd of pedestrians on the city’s famous Las Ramblas boulevard in Barcelona, Spain, on August 17, 2017
Terrorists responsible killed 14 people and wounded over a hundred in the Catalonia district after a van plowed through crowds traveling up to 60 mph
Terrorists responsible killed 14 people and wounded over a hundred in the Catalonia district after a van plowed through crowds traveling at a rate of up to 60 mph.
ISIS has since accounted for the act of terrorism, which closely mimics the attacks in London, Berlin, Stockholm and Nice.
The 17-year-old Moroccan man operating the vehicle, Moussa Oukabir, was shot dead by police in Cambrils Friday following the event.
Heidi also spoke with ABC 7 in a phone interview,
‘I got shoved into the souvenir kiosk and was able to kind of duck into there with a small group of people,’ she said.
Heidi and a group a people she was hiding with were evacuating by police to a safer area.
Jared was the only American fatality in the attack. He was not initially listed as a victim in the hospitals nearby the scene of the attack. He was pronounced dead on Friday, when he and Heidi had planned to jet back home
‘We had no idea what was going on,’ she added. ‘So trying to figure out what was happening, trying to get back to the main road.’
Heidi grew concerned when she hadn’t heard from her husband all day.
‘I was looking for Jared the whole time. I kept wanting to go back to the main road (because I thought) that’s where he would have been.’
Jared was the only American fatality in the attack. He was not initially listed as a victim in the hospitals nearby the scene of the attack.
He was pronounced dead on Friday, when he and Heidi had planned to jet back home from their first trip to Europe.
‘It’s hard not to be angry,’ Heidi said in the NBC interview.
‘It’s confusing why anybody would want to hurt anybody like that. Why would you want to hurt strangers? Why would you want to hurt anybody?
‘I’m a mom and I’m a teacher and things that are truly important to me — and to Jared — was teaching our children to be kind, to treat mankind the way that you want to be treated, to be tolerant of people that are different than you.
‘So I can’t understand,’ she added. ‘I don’t understand why anybody would do that.’
A GoFundMe page has been set up by a relative of Jared’s to help the family with funeral expenses.
Moussa Oukabir, 17, (pictured) was operating the vehicle in the Barcelona attack Thursday. He was shot dead by police in Cambrils Friday following the event